Japan Trip 2009: The flight

I've talked before about my fear of flying, and also specifically about flying to Japan. I've taken extreme measures to control my phobia, up to and including the use of controlled substances (by prescription!). I will say that living near a major airport, I'm getting a little better - it does kind of sink in after a while that all these planes are taking off and landing all around you, and why should my flight be so special and crash?

The flight to Japan this time was actually pretty pleasant, at least as flying goes these days. We always try to fly either ANA or JAL and preferably ANA, mostly because of the service and food.


This was my first time flying a 777 to Japan, and we got the Star Alliance plane. ANA actually switched to 777's a couple years ago now, but we flew JAL last time and they were still running 747's on the route. I have to say that despite having two fewer engines, I might actually like the 777 a little better for long flights. They're a little quieter, and maybe this was just my perception but it seemed that they're pressurized to a lower "cabin altitude". (Airline cabins aren't pressurized to sea level pressure - more like 8,000 feet, so you can still suffer from altitude effects, especially on long flights. But the exact pressure can vary from airplane to airplane.) I felt less fatigue by the end of the flight, and less of that light-headedness that I've come to associate with flying in general.

ANA feeds you two big meals and a snack, same as JAL, but I think the quality of ANA's food is a little better. Or at least I did, until the breakfast just before landing on the way to Japan, which had the whole plane talking. It was some sort of Korean thing, for reasons nobody could figure out, and it was basically ground beef and cabbage. I heard some Americans talking about how "interesting" it was, but even the Japanese passengers just thought it was strange. My wife and the woman sitting next to her actually spent about 20 minutes talking and laughing about it before landing. No, Japanese people do not regularly eat Korean breakfasts. (The breakfast in the other direction was western - pancakes and sausage.)

The offending breakfast.

The lunch was a little more reasonable in both directions, and included choices that were clearly western and Japanese (JAL offers a similar choice, but their options are not very distinct). I don't actually remember what I had on the way out, but I do remember the choice on the way back was beef gyudon or chicken with a cream tomato sauce. They also give you a pretty ludicrous number of side dishes, both hot and cold - potato salad, fruit salad, cold cuts, a roll, cold soba noodles (so glad they brought these back!), Japanese pickles, and they finish it all off by walking around with a cooler full of Haagen Dazs ice cream that's obviously been sitting in liquid nitrogen, because you'd mistake it for concrete.

Oh, and how about this for service: several times throughout the flight, the flight attendants walk around with a basket of wine. In economy class! It is, of course, free. (Or at least, included in your ticket price.)

ANA's in-flight entertainment has always been pretty good, but it's a lot better now than it was even 3 years ago when I last flew them. I believe the system we had this time was called "Magic-2" and it's an all on-demand system with games, movies, audio, TV shows and more. There were more than 40 movies available, some of them good, others not, and both Hollywood and Japanese in origin. (Including big Japanese films like "Departures".) I watched "The International", which was terrible, and the first two Matrix movies (the trilogy is available), which I've seen before but just felt like watching again. My wife watched "Revolutionary Road" and "Hula Girls", which we've watched together before. Funnily enough, they also have the entire first season of "24", which comes with a warning that it may contain disturbing images of planes crashing. This was actually my first experience with on-demand IFE - when we flew JAL last time, they had 13 channels of movies but they were continuously running. That's similar to what ANA had 3 years ago.

ANA is one of the few airlines that generally has nosewheel and external cameras on their aircraft. Some people like this - I usually hate it, because they show the takeoffs and landings on the big screens in the front of the cabin and it always looks like we're headed for the trees. Still, I found myself kind of missing it on the return trip - a newer 777 (built last year) that didn't have either camera. I wonder if they're phasing them out.

We did have them on the flight to Japan, and the landing was crazy. In typically understated fashion, they told us the weather in Narita was "cloudy" before we landed. Of course what they really meant was it was "fogged in solid". (Always add an extra level to whatever they tell you the weather is... "cloudy" either means "foggy" or "heavy thunderstorms". For it to really just be "cloudy", they will say it's "partly sunny".) They turned on the nosewheel cam and all I could see was white. I heard and felt the landing gear drop and the flaps go to full, so I knew we were close to the ground. The runway appeared out of the mist literally a moment before we touched down. I actually said "whoa" out loud when I saw it. Probably an auto-land. The funny thing was I always look to the flight attendants to see if they're scared - well, we were sitting right next to one this time, and after landing, she was actually patting her chest!

Anyway, we lived to fly another day.

Random Japan: $90 Mangos

I swear, I've got a bunch of longer posts I will get to. For now, just satiate yourselves with these $90 mangos, found in some upscale supermarket in Shinjuku that I can't recall the name or location of:

They also had $250 cantaloupes, which I thought we got pictures of but apparently didn't. Picture-taking was not encouraged in there.

Though I will say they came in a two-pack, so, you know, that's double the value.

Japan Trip 2009: Hula Girls!

(I wrote this more than a month ago!)

I'm sitting in the parking lot of Spa Resort Hawaiians in Iwaki City, Japan. Why sit in the parking lot writing a blog post while the rest of my wife's family enjoys themselves inside? Well, let's just say the place is climate controlled. For tropical weather. It's the kind of place where street clothes are actively discouraged, and unfortunately, I wasn't ready to get my bathing suit on. I'll spare you the photos of the sweat stains and the goofy American guy walking around in Doc Martens while the rest of the place goes barefoot. (Honestly, though, I wasn't the only guy there who was overdressed.)

So why the hell did I come here in the first place?

For the Hula Girls!

One of the goofy Japanese chick flicks my wife coerced me into watching was about this place. As usual, I think I ended up liking it better than her, even though it's totally manipulative and sappy. Still, it really was a true story - pretty much all of it, apparently - and that makes it a little easier to take at face value.

This used to be an isolated coal mining town, until the coal ran out and the mining company moved away. The government's bright idea to save the town was to build an indoor theme park modeled on Hawaii. The showpiece would be a hula dance troupe made up of girls from around the towns of Joban and Yumoto. Given that nobody in this conservative little area had any experience doing anything except mining coal, a lot of people obviously thought this was a crazy idea. But, well, it wouldn't be a very good movie if it ended there, right?

So a cosmopolitan but otherwise washed-up dance teacher arrives from Tokyo, at first much too diva-ish for this little town full of men and women who still think showing a little ankle is taboo. But eventually her group of spunky wannabe dancers wins her over, and with her help they convert the rest of the town into believers. And waddaya know, it works. The Joban Hawaiian Center (as it was called back then, and is still colloquially called now) saves the town, with the Hula Girls drawing massive crowds.

More than 40 years later, they still do.

Here's the kinda lame trailer to the movie:


I'm not sure if the girls are all still from around town. They don't really look it - they look Polynesian, although some of that's obviously just makeup and hair style. But they're clearly professionals now - I mean, this has been a famous dance troupe for decades at this point.

There are two big dance shows per day, plus a few smaller ones sprinkled throughout (there's one just for kids). We went to the early show, which probably isn't quite as elaborate as the later one, but it was just too hot to even consider staying. I mean I know I talked about it already, but walking in there from outside is like a slap in the face every time. It's like hitting a wall of humidity. Honestly, I've been to Hawaii, and Hawaii is not like this. I wasn't sure I'd even make it through the show. I had to prepare - we bought a Chinese-style fan ($16), a towel ($5), and a bottle of water ($1.50) before I could sit in any semblance of comfort. My wife wasn't quite so bad - I did fan her a bit too, but it's like this in late summer everywhere in Japan, so she's kind of used to it.

It was worth it, though. Hula is one of those dances that's hard to really get until you see it live (though the movie version's pretty good too). It is amazing how those girls move. It is a sexy dance. And actually really graceful too; it's not all booty-shaking like you usually see on TV, though there was plenty of that in the finale. It's kind of like a combination of ballet and pole dancing.



I have to mention the fire guys too, who may well have been in the movie for all I know, but I don't remember. But they were amazing, doing the whole fire baton twirling thing, really really fast, without making any mistakes whatsoever. Totally perfect, all three of them, and each also doing crazy stuff like licking the fire, or grabbing the fire on one end of the baton and setting fire to the other end with their bare hands.



If you do actually come better prepared than we did, there's a lot of other stuff to do at this place - water slides, wave pools, etc. There's also a real spa, as the name suggests, an arcade, various restaurants, and a hula museum, most of which is more specific to the Hawaiian Center than hula in general. They've got a big exhibit on the movie too - these are some of the real costumes the characters wore:

Oh, one thing - the movie apparently wasn't filmed here, but it looks really similar. They've changed the configuration since the 1960's anyway, and the photos in the museum from that era look almost exactly like the movie. It's uncanny. Watching the show really felt like being in the movie, even with the stage facing the opposite way. I highly recommend the movie, and I even more highly recommend seeing the show live if you can.

If you do go, you really need to stop at Papa bakery on the way out. Japanese bread is a whole post unto itself (hmmmmm...) and this is some of the best I've ever had.

That's a melon pan, a curry pan, a cream puff, and some other stuff for the family. Really, really yummy.

Japan Trip 2009: Ushiku Daibutsu

This is one of those things I've been meaning to do on every trip I've ever taken to Japan and have never gotten around to before.

The Ushiku Daibutsu is the tallest bronze statue in the world. It used to be the tallest statue of any kind in the world, but that title now belongs to another Buddha statue in China (made of copper). Ushiku Daibutsu is in my wife's prefecture, and we've driven by it a whole bunch of times but never actually gone up there. It's kind of like how I'm within sight of the Statue of Liberty pretty much every other day so I never think to actually visit it; my in-laws are the same with this. But we finally went this time, at least for 10 minutes or so. (We didn't have time to go inside, though you can go up to the top and look out through slits in the Buddha's chest.)

This thing is huge. It's difficult to capture its scale in pictures. That concrete base alone is three stories high. The statue itself is three times taller than the Statue of Liberty and 30 times larger by volume. I heard some other westerners saying "what's the point?" as they were looking at it, but that's like asking "what's the point of a temple?" or "what's the point of a cathedral?" It is a religious thing, not just a tourist destination.

I didn't just go there because it's a big statue, though. No, I went there because of course, this was the setting for the final battle scene of one of my favorite movies!


That's the ending of "Kamikaze Girls", which is about a Lolita and a Yanqui girl who react very differently to the boringness of Ibaraki prefecture (and let's face it, it is boring), but who end up best friends. At the end of the movie, they need to fight their way through an all-girl biker gang, meeting up at Ushiku Daibutsu.

We actually looked for the exact spot where they filmed this but we couldn't find it, mostly because we forgot what the actual view of the statue was in the movie. We were looking everywhere but this side. I don't think you can actually get to that location from inside the statue grounds anyway; you can see that even in the movie, it's fenced off. It's probably not empty anymore either; I think they cleared this area just for filming. I definitely didn't see any clearings like this anywhere around the statue. (If you look at the Google map aerial view of this area, you can see where the filming must have taken place, and that land seems to have some sort of use.)

Ah well. Still was fun, though, and an impressive sight. Nothing like this exists in the United States, not on this scale.

Japan Trip 2009: MOSDO!

I wrote about the MOSDO donut burger before our trip - of course, it was one of the first things on our itinerary. I'm actually at that weird stage right now where I'm looking at all my photos that I took for blog posts and thinking "did I really do that? Was I actually in Japan two weeks ago?" It already no longer seems quite real as I settle back into my normal routine. But anyway...



I thought you had to pick one version, but no - they give you both. They're tiny, so it works out.



Here's a "potedo", the fries that are available with it, complete with ketchup:



I admit I didn't realize that yes, that's real ketchup. That was kind of an odd taste sensation - I was expecting it to be some kind of cherry or strawberry thing (it's a freakin' donut!) but no, as it hit my tongue I got that tang and salty taste and I was momentarily confused.

The MOSDO itself is actually pretty good, and not too sweet like I was worried it would be. The "bun" is not really sweetened at all, so it really is just like a piece of soft bread, then the chocolate "patty" is really just a chocolate bar, then there's some foam and sauce where most of the sweetness comes from.

I also didn't realize that MOS Burger also has their own MOSDO - this is not a one-way thing.



In a way it's actually kind of a ripoff, because they're just cutting a hole in the middle of the meat. But they do also give it a new flavor, which seems totally unrelated to it supposedly being a "donut", but whatever. It's "wasabi" flavored, which I actually thought was really good.



See, they stick it right in the hole. (Also underneath the rest of the meat.)

I put "wasabi" in quotes because I don't think that's really what it is - you can see it's white, and it tasted to me like regular horseradish. I don't know if the Japanese really know what western horseradish is, though, so they just call it "wasabi" (which is a kind of horseradish anyway). Or maybe they do know, and they just thought calling it wasabi would sell better.

In any case, like other spicy stuff in Japan, they're not messing around. This burger will burn your eyebrows off and make steam come out of your ears. Yeah, it was good. Though not good enough to supercede my default spicy MOS burger, which I went back to on subsequent visits.

Japan Trip 2009: Quarantine!

I'm falling behind on my Japan trip report, so I figured I'd better post this now given that it's already getting pretty obsolete:


I'd heard that Japan was being a little paranoid about the H1N1 swine flu virus (ironic, given that regular old non-swine flu seems to be their biggest problem), and sure enough, when we landed at Narita our airplane was quarantined before we were allowed off.

What this meant was that we all had to sit down and wait as a group of doctors in full protective bio-suits roamed up and down the plane looking for people who they thought might be sick. It was like something out of a Spielberg movie, and I really wanted to take photos of these people but I was afraid that'd be an excuse for them to pull me off the plane. I did at least get the souvenir "You were quarantined!!" notice pictured above.

The funny thing was there seemed to be no scientific methodology to whatever these doctors were doing. I suppose they were looking for anyone sweating, or coughing, or pale, or whatever. But surely this disease has an incubation period, or symptoms that can be hidden in the early stages - I mean, can you really control a virus by just looking at people to see if you think they're sick? It all seemed pointless.

Anyway, it didn't take long, and it gave me a little story to tell.

Japan Trip 2009: an interesting few days...

This was always going to be a combined business trip and vacation. But since we've been in Tokyo, it's actually been almost all business. It's been fun, but completely exhausting, and I honestly feel physically beaten up by now. (The last is actually not new; every time I visit Tokyo, I'm full of bumps, bruises and scrapes by the time we leave.)

The Japanese way of doing business is completely alien to me; interesting and logical in its own way, but I understand now why it sometimes takes so long for products to make their way from one country to another, and for deals to get made.

We've had several meetings this week that all involve nothing more than setting up wholesale accounts to buy and sell products. In the United States, this is a simple transaction in which documents are exchanged and, if everything's in order, a contract signed and an account opened. The whole thing can be done by email and fax in about ten minutes.

In Japan, business deals are made not based on legal documents but on trust. A simple faxed contract transaction in the United States is a sit-down meeting in Japan, usually with top executives at the company. These play out like job interviews and are no less stressful. There is a lot of gamesmanship, of feeling each other out, trying to ask the right questions and give the right answers without giving all your secrets away (or the secrets of any of the other companies you're talking to).

I think, in the end, that it probably comes down to what sort of feeling the guy on the other side gets about you.

I got the sense, sitting through all these meetings, that a long time ago somebody from Honda, or Sony, or Canon or whatever other Japanese company you could think of had exactly this same sort of meeting with somebody from the United States who was trying to convince them to sell their products in America.

We had a pretty good batting average on this trip but I won't say it was a perfect 1.000 (update: yes it was). I will say that the gamesmanship still continues, so I can't give away what our real success rate was. I'll also say that we got a better feeling ourselves about some companies than others, though no doubt things can and will change over time. The Japanese business mentality is interesting as far as what their concerns are and how they see their place in the world. I've known this for some time, probably ever since I talked to the people who run the Nakayama Doll Company in Kyoto, which has been in business with one main store for 500 years now. Who needs growth? Who needs expansion? Why rock the boat?

And after all, deals are closed without so much as a signature. It's a question of loyalty. Loyalty can block some deals from happening and help seal others. But you must pledge your loyalty to at least some degree, and it's expected that anything you say out loud will be honored. A signature is not necessary.

Japan Trip 2009: The view

This is the view from our hotel balcony(!) during the day (click through for the full effect):



And at night, the view I'm looking at right now as I type this - again, clickable:



That's Shinjuku, which has turned out to be a great place to stay.

The funny thing about panoramas is that because you get the same effect as an extreme wide-angle lens, everything looks really far away. In fact, those tall buildings loom pretty large and are only about 500 feet away. These are full 180 degree panoramas.

I'm going to write more about our hotel a little bit later - it is a great place. Just don't really have time to do a full writeup now, but I'll get to it.

Japan Trip 2009: a question of priorities

We are obviously not traditional tourists. What's the first thing you do when you go to Tokyo?


See Star Trek, of course.

Some of the other things we've done so far:

* Gone shopping in Harajuku
* Gone to MOS Burger for a MOSdo burger
* Gone to McDonald's for a teriyaki burger and a deep fried pie
* Gone to a ramen shop
* Gone out drinking

Today and tomorrow, we're meeting with some Japanese clothing brands.

I'm gonna write about some of these things, plus our hotel and our flight, which was actually not that bad. Our hotel is pretty fabulous - I'm rendering out a couple of panoramas of the view right now, will post them later.

By the way, I liked Star Trek, but was surprised at how much like a regular TOS movie it seemed to me. I felt like I was watching Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock put together (especially as long as it was), but with a younger cast. It had a more modern look, but I was just expecting a little something more substantively different, given all the talk. This was regular old TOS Trek to me.