After hearing that Omotesando was closed down, I got up early and headed down to my local Softbank shop at 5:30 this morning. I needn’t have worried, cos there was noone there yet. At 6:00, the next iPhone fan arrived, an otaku kind of guy. At 7:00, a very genki oyaji came along, he was [...]
A few details from a friend working in a Softbank shop..
Only 10 phones are going to be delivered. It’s a small shop, but that’s a very small number. The shipment will only arrive tomorrow.
Phone calls were coming in all day asking if they could reserve. The policy at the shop was no reservations, you have [...]
Here’s the best keyboard shop that I’ve found in Tokyo. It’s in Akihabara, about 5 minutes walk from the station, in a small alley. It’s called Cleverly and there are 3 separate stores. Only one of them does all keyboards, but they’re all close together, so just ask if you land in the wrong one. [...]
Here’s a great list of all the libraries in the Tokyo area. It’s all in Kanji, but you can run it through a translator to find the one you need. This is probably going to be my next project for scraping, translating and mapping.
http://www.reference-net.jp/lib_dir/13.html
Here’s a page with links to libraries throughout Japan, organised by prefecture.
Update: [...]
I got a call from an unknown number on my Keitai but didn’t answer it. It looked like a business number with repeating parts (043-224-1010) and I knew that it was in Chiba by the first 3 digits. Being paranoid, instead of calling it back I went and searched on the internet. It turns out [...]
Japan Rail has a great page with maps of many major stations. I didn’t like the way they pop out a new page for every one, so I wrote a quick parser to grab all the links. Here’s the pages for individual station maps. Most are in Tokyo, but a few are further away (eg [...]
Last weekend I went into my local bookstore after work and found a great new magazine there called Baburu Kenchiku Go! It’s all about architecture made around the time of the Japanese Bubble years, from the mid-80s to the early 90s. The buildings built then show a great optimism and willingness to experiment, but also [...]
Using Google Maps to do geocoding of addresses in Japan and the US gives back much different results. Geocoding is when you ask Google Maps for information about an address. For example, you could search for “Empire State Building” and get back the address “Empire State Building, New York, NY 10001, USA” along with it’s [...]
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