The tea master showing us the green tea powder used for the Japanese tea ceremony. Powder is made out of young tea leaves picked by hand, dried and grinded. Unlike English tea, there is no heat added.
If you’d like an authentic tea ceremony experience, make reservations at Happoen in Shirokanedai, where one of the most beautiful Japanese garden and traditional tea room can be found.
In a tea ceremony where sweets are served before the green tea is served to the guests. Pink sugary sweet has a hydrangea motif, which reminds you that it is now the high season for the flower.
You know you are in a nice restaurant when its restroom offers towels in cotton instead of paper.
Photos are from the restroom in a Japanese restaurant called Higashiyama in Tokyo. The stylish grid you see on the wall behind the toilet is a rack filled with toilet papers.
Japanese traditional papers are made out of bark while Western papers from pulp. This makes Japanese papers strong and to have unique textures.
The photo shows three different paper ingredients. Bottom and middle: Japanese paper ingredients, Kozo and Mitsumata. The one at the very back, the pure white one is the pulp, typical ingredients for Western papers.
Photos taken from Ozuwashi, Nihonbashi.
Beautiful point cards from Winged Wheel Stationary. I must say I am not quite sure of the purpose, the shop explains such cards are used before in French schools as some kind of rewarding system for kids.
How do you define an asocial behavior? Taking several seats and lying down can be considered ill-mannered, yet looking at how people place shoes differently, make you feel one is more well-mannered than the other.
How about this one? Another sleepy couple in Tokyo? In fact they were strangers. Typically when the train becomes empty and strangers are seated next to each other, the one who sits further from the corner stands up swiftly and change one’s seat to give more space to the one at the corner. However, this time the lady was too sleepy; She started to lean her heads on the young man instead of standing up and making any space. He seemed confused, but decided that he will just let go. For another few stations, she leaned to his shoulder until she realized it was her stop and left the train.
Living in a dense city is about creating your own comfort zone and letting others to have one. And although it is in a small level, it seems that people are practicing this in their everyday lives.
Nikkei BP online released a survey results concerning the children’s Internet usage in March 2010. According to the release, the very first Internet device children own are:
Mobile phone in fact comes as 5th, 4.1%. PC comes at the very last of this list as 6th, 0.7%.
While adults in Japan utilize the mobile phones excessively, from emails, browsers, mobile TVs, and e-wallets, the penetration of mobile phone used as an Internet device for children, is extremely low.
So when do children start owning mobile phones? According to the government’s survey in 2007, 31.3% of the primary school student (< age 12), 57.6% of of junior-high (up to age 15), and 96.0％ of high-school students own one.
The primary reason for this low penetration of mobile Internet use is naturally the data cost. In many cases parents will pay for their phone bills and accessing online can be costly. Features like Wi-Fi is a feature yet associated with relatively new, smart phones, which will be too expensive to give away to their kids. Beyond that, the survey focuses on the ownership of the device, it fails to explain how much these devices are used to access online, and for what.
Game devices, they are simply the very first electronics that most kids own. Whether Nintendo DS or PSP, they both come with Wi-Fi feature by default. When I met quite children between ten and 14-years-old, they mentioned that they cannot recall anyone in the class without Nintendo DS. When they can name one, they always explained me the reason why: “His/Her parents are very strict, they are school teachers.” Somehow, children had good explanation why these kids did not have one.
When most start their portable gaming with DS, but as boys reach to the age of 10 or 11, some start to feel DS is not exciting enough: They want games to be more real, and in some cases, more violent. That is when they turn to PSP.
From what I gathered, children did not seem too enthusiastic about radio communication. It was quite a contrast, considering how adults went crazy last year with the classic Dragon Quest game, enabling passers-by to exchange virtual items on the street. Children do use radio communication, but from the way they have described, it was only an occasional and perpetual act: they spend far more time on their own fiddling with the game by him/herself, and they did not feel that they are so dedicated to wireless interaction.
I tend to forget, but children are very busy. Simply, they do not have time to see friends any more. Many children start preparing for the junior-high exams around the age of 11, and the ones they do not, tend to be engaged in football practices or ballet lessons, if not both. “I used to see my friends a lot more, now we just don’t have time.” The way they described sounded as it was one of the big changes in their life. By the age of 12, they are already looking back how things were when they were 10.
Turning back to the question on mobile phones, what is the situation? Mobile Internet has been publicly labeled as evil for youth. For a past decade or so, the very nature of personal device made children to access Internet behind parental control, which led some children to engage in accidents and crimes. One unfortunately common tragedy associated with mobile phones, is children committing suicide. Bullying others can be observed in many youth culture, but because these activities shifted from physical to virtual, it seems became even harder for teachers to spot before too late.
Although parental controls and filtering services took place, that did not appear sufficient to the government. Ministry of Education has officially announced that compulsory educational institutions forbid children to bring their mobile phones to school. Many schools individually set rules about what children should or should not bring to school, but mobile phone is the very first device the government itself has defined the rule. One city even have a slogan: “Do not possess, do not bring, do not let them bring.”, which follows the tone of the nation’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
If educational institutions kick out the technology, then it will eventually become individual household’s responsibility to discuss and think of how to use the technology. That seems like a challenge, as I encountered difficulties to follow what children spoke of during the research. I personally would hope to see something in line with this for a change: Here a history teacher in Massachusetts utilizes mobile phones for his class, the message seems quite different from the government here in Japan.
The blob-shaped sticker placed above sample bottle in the vending machine reads: “Please be informed that we are currently changing the package design and you may have different design from the sample.” It took me some time to notice any difference, even after comparing the two next to each other.
To what extent do people notice and willing to notice the packaging design? Often packages, characters, and brand logos, they change so subtle that we do not notice at once. It is only in a time span of decades that we see how far they have changed along the trends.
With that in mind, perhaps you might be interested in seeing the 2 minutes video here, showing gradual transformation of the famous Hello Kitty character along its 35 year history.
One wipe is from Japan, another from China. Which one do you think comes from which country?
Had this been 10 years ago, I would have said that the small one with Snoopy drawing is from Japan. After all, Japanese love to make everything small; they love cartoons, too. It was no doubt.
As some of you can tell from the text, it is in fact that Snoopy mini-wipe that comes from China. After all, it is China where SARS had a serious impact to their economy and hygienic practices, the market seems to have more variety than in Japan.
Speaking of drug store products, I am always curious what kind of products come with different flavors and scents. For instance in France, I am always amazed by the countless lineup of shower gel, with so many different scents. Here in Beijing, I found out that sanitary napkins come with Aloe Vera and Green Tea scent.
The brand Watson’s is a pharmaceutical giant originally from Hong Kong, with 8,800 retail stores in Asia. And of course, none of them in Japan.
A lady walks on the platform in Yoyogi station as she operates her mobile phone. Yellow signs read “Watch your steps.”
