Sumo Star Asashoryu in Fanta Commercials

While I was exploring Tokyo, I spotted a large ad for Fanta near Shibuya Station.

The ad campaign's spokesman is the biggest name in professional sumo, Asashoryu. He is one of two wrestlers currently at the rank of yokozuna.


I saw this one a few days later at the shopping mall in Sano.

I'm especially interested in the ways that American companies adapt to local markets, and this instance is especially cool. Sure, it's just an ad campaign, but I think it's interesting for a foreign company to tap into something as traditional as sumo wrestling(my sumo experience here). According to a tiny article on JapanToday, Asasyoryu plays "the role of a 13-year-old exchange student from Mongolia "FanTaro"". The article is straightforward enough that there's not a lot of room for interpretation, but I learned a little bit from the snide comments from readers. Sumo wrestlers aren't supposed to be seen in public wearing western style clothes, but it seems that special permission was given by the Japan Sumo Association, most likely involving a dump truck full of money.

Here are a couple of the TV spots. They are actually pretty funny.

In this one the big guy introduces himself to the class and they all freak out and run away.

I think I understand what's going on in this one. The three kids all come home late, and the mom asks FanTaro where they have been. He replies "club", and the mom imagines them rockin' out on the dance floor. The kids drop trow to reveal their sumo clothes and say they were at their club at school.

They are talking too fast for me in this one, but it involves the underclassman FanTaro being bullied by some older guys. This one is funny for me because there are several of these punky crazy haired kids at my school too.

You might notice how tiny the can is in that last one. It's called a Fanta FuruFuru Charge. There's gelatin and carbonated liquid in the can that is mixed by shaking. I think it tastes nasty, but that might be because its so foreign to me. The first time I bought one I didn't realize that it wasn't a normal soda. I ended up having to throw it away because the chemistry of the whole thing is ruined if you don't shake it before opening. Very strange.

I had Angelica try one and she concurred: Nasty!


One of my most common Seven-Eleven purchases is Melon Soda Fanta. Its super good. I better stock up before I leave.

1/16/08 Finding Tochigi Prefecture, Cont.

I figured in order to give Angelica a better picture of my typical week that we should check out the surrounding cities in Tochigi. We managed to hit both of my two usuals, Ota and Sano. Keep in mind that I haven't even reached New Years yet... I'm going as fast as I can! Hehe.

We had to get something to eat before we went anywhere. After a short food-finding mission, we went to the kaitenzushi place nearish to my house, right across from the mall.

I don't recall how well I have described the "conveyor belt sushi" place previously. It would be an awful disservice to not mention it, so at the risk of repeating myself, I'll take this opportunity to give a brief overview.

Maybe one of my favorite places to eat in Japan is the kaitenzushi. Literally "revolving sushi" (according to my deft dictionary skills), it is a sushi restaurant for the masses. Rather than sit opposite the counter from a mean old man with a knife and a pile of fishies, the chefs are all in the back out of sight, where they belong! Booyah. Anyway, they prepare a variety of sushi on small plates, then set the plates in a continuous line on a conveyor belt. The belt then snakes through the entire restaurant, making itself accessible to every single table.

It is on the low end of sushi to be sure, both in quality in price, but they are often uncommonly crowded. Maybe one of the few places in town that I have ever waited to get a seat are these wonderful establishments. It is convenient for me, children, and the semi-literate in that you need not actually read the menu, as you can simply pull whatever you desire from the conveyor belt. If what you are hankering for doesn't seem to be on rotation, though, you can order something specific from an intercom installed at each table. The one we went to on this occasion was cool because each table had its own touch screen menu, which cuts human interaction down even further... yes! At the end of your meal, a waitress will simply count the number of plates stacked on your table in order to calculate your bill. Most plates are about 1 dollar, but there are specially colored plates denoting higher prices. Things like cake, juice boxes, and French fries will also randomly appear mixed in with the sealife on the conveyor.

In conclusion, kaitenzushi is cheap, easy to order, and friggin delicious. I would eat there everyday. And my mom says that's ok.

Your special orders will come by on the same conveyor, only with a table number and a sign telling everyone to keep their sticky claws off of it.

Here's a picture of me loving sushi.

Sano. It is possible that I made a mistake taking her to Sano, as it features both a shopping mall and a huge outlet mall within walking distance of each other. We spent a considerable part of a day looking for a "Japanese style" purse. As the outlet is mostly comprised of American and European brands, there wasn't a whole lot of Japanese styled things to be found. So after a long day of shopping, we started to walk to the other mall. But wait.

Not even yet out of sight of those awful stores, one of Angelica's shoe's heels broke, making walking a very unfortunate exercise. Luckily for one of us, we were right next to a giant outlet mall... So after quite enough shopping, we plunged back into the jungle to go shoe shopping... AHHH! hehe. After a bit of fruitless wandering, I took Angelica to the Nike store and she wasn't allowed to come out until she bought some shoes... hehe. Quite an experience.

Here's a really spoiled girl wearing some new kicks.

We then briefly checked out the more standard mall in Sano before we were ready to ditch town. Unfortunately the nice shuttle bus that had conveniently taken us from the train station had stopped for the day, so we were left in clutches of the taxi people.

Quite an interesting taxi calling system. The large green sign on the left side is the place to wait for a taxi. Fine. The map on the sign, though, directs you to go to a different sign first. You can just make it out: its at the end of the row of bikes on the side of that column, also green. Anyway, you go over there and press a button located on the wall in order to call a taxi. I'm not sure how much I believe that button actually does anything, but after a bit of a wait a taxi did in fact arrive.


Here I am talking trash to a conquered Sano. Yeah, Boyyyy!


*******

On a separate day that same week we took the train to Ota. I think that Angelica was surprised how short of a ride it is: maybe three or four train stops from my house. It might be that the two cities actually border each other... not completely sure.

I wanted to go there specifically because I wanted to show Angelica all the cool ethnic stuff near the train station. I think she thought the Brazilian supermercado was cool. She was trying to convince me that because she could speak Spanish, she would therefore be able to make herself understood to the Portuguese speaking staff. Maybe they were just unprepared for the Español, but the little that we tried was not very successful. We then had a nice dinner at an Indian place and we strolled around town a bit.

We went to check out a nearby arcade and had a bit of fun playing some random things. I thought that I should once again demonstrate my claw game prowess.

This little character is named unchi-kun. Unchi, meaning poop in Japanese, is a lovable little guy from some TV show that I have never seen ("-kun" is a name suffix used for males... I think it means little boy). I do know, though, that he will have a good life at my apartment. Reminds me a bit of Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo.

Unfortunately a YouTube search for "unchi" didn't give me the insight I was hoping for, but it did yield an entertaining Japanese (with English subtitles) potty training video. Enjoy.

Here is a gigantically out-of-place wedding hall in Ota. It invokes comparison to the White House, but upon closer inspection the building seems a lot cheaper.. the whole thing looks to be constructed of different colors of concrete. The chapel looking thing to the right is similarly fake. It is built on top of the main building and doesn't touch the ground. Anxious to see what a fake house of worship looks like on the inside, I looked for an entrance, but soon realized the only way in is through the lobby of the main building. I think Angelica was not amused by the concept of a fake church.

One of Angelica's favorite things in the world is losing to me at video games, so I figured we should use our various train wait times to get some quality Nintendo DS time in.

Angelica met some of the gang at karaoke one night. That spacey-looking remote is how you pick which song you want played. She was completely captivated by my crooning.

*******

Completely unrelated to anything, but cool anyway. An interesting ad for the lottery featuring some Power Ranger looking characters.

Speaking of which, the Power Ranger series' are all originally a Japanese product. For release in the US some of the scenes were re-shot, but all of the battle scenes are taken directly from the Japanese series and dubbed. Trivia, I know.

12/5/07 Busy Busy

I have had so much going on lately. It's been super crazy. Last Thursday and Friday I attended an English teacher's conference in Utsunomiya. I really enjoyed it. We had a few speakers at the beginning, as well as several workshops in smaller groups. We all traded ideas about effective ways to teach and interact with the kids.

One of the main ideas expressed in several conversations involved connecting English with the outside world. Quite often what we teach in class is restricted to the contents of the textbook. We were encouraged to try to find ways to connect the English we are teaching to some interesting things that are happening in the outside world. This makes everything seem more relevant and worth learning. The whole conference really motivated me to think about how I am doing my job. Hopefully I can put some of those ideas into practice.

Last Sunday I took a Japanese test at Hakuo University in Oyama. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a standardized test that measures one's ability in reading, listening, and grammar. I took the lowest of the four levels, but I was still really surprised about how hard it was. I am not completely sure that I will even pass it. I won't get the results of the test back until February, apparently. An awful long time to run a paper of filled-in ovals through a machine, but whatever. If I pass I get a cool certificate and the supreme admiration of my peers.

Here's a clip from two weeks ago from a bar in nearby Sano. Its one song from a Japanese band that I particularly liked. Not only was the music good, but the lead singer had an awesome energy to him. He did lots of little dances that were super cool... only a couple of them are in this song. He wore a really nice suit, but he would strip a piece or two of it off every song until he was singing in his undies. Then at the end of the last song he mooned everyone. Unpleasant, but in a funny way. Enjoy. (Note: This is just one of the normal songs at the beginning. Moon-free.)





Oh, one last little thing. My favorite text message, maybe ever. So I talked a few posts ago about Nounours, a cool French guy that I met a few weeks ago. We were supposed to play poker last weekend. He replied with a pretty damn good excuse:

cant.got married today.hanging with the family.

Mind you, he is the one that suggested playing poker the week before... We all had a good laugh.

Tokyo and the Longest Day EVER

The trip started in a way that was screaming for me to stay out of it. I had hoped to have everyone meet before we left in order to discuss what everyone wanted to do, and maybe look at some maps and make some timing decisions. If we wanted to stay the night then I thought that it would also be a wise measure to reserve some lodging somewhere ahead of time so that we wouldn't have to worry about it later. We opted to worry about it later.

So we all packed up a couple days worth of clothes and then just hopped on the train to Tokyo. Between the four of us, the only information about this place amounted to a guidebook or two that points out all of the major sites and hip neighborhoods. We were able to get to the city without incident, miraculously. We proceeded to hit plenty of the important areas all over the city, which was pretty cool. Each of the neighborhoods really deserve their own day to truly experience, so this trip really just served as a sampling of everything.


Here are a few random shots of the city lights. We walked to so many areas that I don't even remember which picture is which place, but they look pretty cool anyhow.

Here I am standing in front of Takeshita-dori, which is the main street in a well known area in Tokyo called Harajuku. My best friend Gwen Stefani is also a fan, as her Japanese dance-team minions are named the "Harajuku Girls" in a nod to the often outlandish fashion sense displayed there.



This was supposed to show how crowded the subway was. Unfortunately the only thing crowding this shot is my face.

After several hours of zipping back and forth on the subway, we thought we should chill out and have a drink someplace. We must have picked the wrong block, because maybe three bars in a row wouldn't even let us sit down, and were really rude about it. Normally restaurant workers and the like are annoyingly polite, so I was really weirded out by how curt the bar workers were being. Anyway, we were not real happy with the city by this point, and decided it was time to go home. Unfortunately we decided this five minutes too late. We had missed the last train out of town. After wandering a bit and trying to decide what to do next, we happened upon a bus station. They didn't have any buses going to our town, but they had one in Sano. I knew Sano was near Ashikaga just because I've heard people talk about going there. We didn't know what we would do after the bus ride, but we decided to take it anyway.

Once in Sano, we did a bit of wandering of the city streets. For a moment I seriously considered sleeping on a bench at the indoor bus stop until morning when all of the modes of transportation would once again be available. We all trudged along, weary and aimless, for some time. Someone mentioned hitchhiking, but it seemed unlikely that anyone would be brave enough to pick up four foreigners, let alone have room in their miniature car. Eventually we found a supermarket that was open 24 hours. Just out of curiosity I asked one of the security guards how much a taxi home would cost. It ended up not being that bad, especially divided by four. So we all rode a cab back to safety. The end.

The journey back probably ended up taking twice as long and costing three times as much, but it was definitely a bonding experience. I marked the three cities in question on a map here. Kinda reminded me of an episode of The Amazing Race.


This is unrelated, but awesome nonetheless. It is an advertisement, not for a church, but for a wedding stage. Apparently, some Japanese people want to have their wedding pictures look like they do in the West. However, the lack of Christianity in this country means there are few churches anywhere. Enter fake churches. I hear they also dress up random white guys as priests to preside over the photo shoots. Excellent.

Would it be immoral to dress up as a priest for money? Hmm...

Note: I was playing around with new things I could put on the left. There's a very important poll that you should take part in.