I was wandering through Yoyogi park and came upon this massive wall of sake casks. The sign explaining them was filled with 分からない漢字 so I have no idea why it was there, but it looked cool.

I love a good moral dilemma, and I enjoyed following our protagonist out to the brink of insanity and back in the course of grappling with his.

As my local supermarket is on my way home from school, I actually go there about twice a week — a vast improvement from my San Francisco schedule which was more like once every two months.

For the last four weeks or so, next to the checkout stands, a little TV has been playing this ad for a new drink. Over, and over, and over again. The ad isn’t more than twenty seconds long and it’s a catchy little tune sung while a man with a little frog hat on hops up some stairs. I don’t entirely understand the words but it’s something about “having a body like this” (ie. having a frog head).

Japanese supermarkets are noisy places because nearly every aisle has some recorded voice telling you at high volume about some good deal or other. They seem to have a higher tolerance for noise pollution around here. So as to be clearly heard, this little jingle was playing nice and loud.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was cute, but I was relieved when I finally made it through the line at the checkout stand. When it was still playing the next week, I developed a greater respect for the stoic cashiers who tolerated this twenty second auditory virus, over and over again, non-stop, all day, every day. By the third week, I wept at the humanity of it all and was very careful to be nice to the cashiers for fear that they might snap and start beating anyone in arm’s reach with the drawer of their cash register.

On the fourth week, I was relieved to discover that even the iron will of the Japanese has a limit and that they had turned the volume down.

It was certainly better than I expected. Likely it will soon blur together with the various memories of other entertainment experiences, but I enjoyed my time in the theater.

One of my friends invited me on a little excursion up a mountain not too far outside of Tokyo. Since my mother has been pestering me for pictures of Japan, I’ll go ahead and share them with the whole class.

I happened to notice there were comments on some of my posts. Rather surprised that anyone I knew would bother to spend words on this solipsistic enterprise, I curiously investigated. I was right in a totally unexpected way. Spammers are apparently now posting to blogs with semantically ambiguous content, presumably in hopes that people will click on the link provided to the “poster’s” home page. They leave no stone unturned.

The French countryside, the languor of summers in Europe, the love of a naive young lady, all very strange things to be reading about in the midst of the neon and concrete jungle that is Tokyo.

I had forgotten how damned great Super Mario Brothers 3 was. Its reincarnation on the GBA is largely without fault, and I have no regrets about coughing up a second time for such pure, unadulterated goodness.