Almost everywhere you go in Japan, you can see sunken areas surrounded by fences which were at some stage used as tiny resevoirs. Most of the time now they’re just empty. There are a couple of these in the Danchi where I live, but the powers that be have decided to convert one of them [...]
Here’s a project I worked on, then forgot about. I used a screen scraper written in PHP to grab all the Starbucks locations in Japan to make a map. I wrote a batch geocoder to run the address results through Google Maps geocoder and recorded the latitude and longitude of each one.
With Japanese addresses, you [...]
If you own a dog in Japan, you have to register it and make sure it has a name tag. It’s very rare to see stray dogs walking around and I’ve only ever seen a dog catcher once.
When you register your dog, you get a sticker for that year to put on your entrance. Each [...]
A couple of odd stickers I noticed while cycling. They were tiny and old and the only reason I even saw them was because the traffic light was red. When I showed it to someone to translate, she told me it gave off a bad feeling. It looks like a voodoo sticker to me. The [...]
Here’s an old abandoned cigarette shop I came across on the road between Hasama and Funabashi. It looks like it’s been this way for years, but the price of a pack of cigs written on the poster is ¥240, so it can’t be that old. Now a pack is somewhere around ¥320 I think.
The location [...]
I wrote a post before about some JR train station maps that are on their site. The list included only maps that had English translations, but recently I found a much longer list (with 170 stations). It’s only in Japanese but you can work out the general layout by looking.
I ran the HTML page [...]
I found a few strange stations in Japan, which have ‘Eki’ as part of the name, so they end up being called eki-eki.
Here’s one called Koyukanshineki eki: 湖遊館新駅駅 and another called Hiroshima Eki Eki (can’t find any more information on this one, so it might be wrong).
Here’s one more: 横川駅駅 (Yokogawa Eki Eki)
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. [...]
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