Ippoippo

Hmmm. Rushing around the (currently very busy due to Christmas) streets of Bath, and I’m noticing a rather strange phenomenon. Take this normal day to day scenario. You are walking down the street, through the crowds. In the medium distance, you become aware someone is vaguely on the same path as you, but coming down in the other direction. In most cases, as if by sixth sense, you and other party are aware of the situation and come to a mutual decision about how to avoid collision way before you actually get close to colliding. Only sometimes do you end up doing that silly dance in the middle of the street, both going the same way.

So, when I first arrived in Japan, for some reason, this sixth sense broke down. I would constantly find myself narrowly avoiding people at last minute. It was only towards the end of my time in Japan that sixth sense came back. OR, had I merely learnt how to read Japanese brains better???

The thing is now, maybe my brain went a little ‘native’ in Japan, because I’m having the old problem again back here in the UK. I’ve forgotton how to think like a Brit! It’s a bizzare thing, and I’m sure most of you are wondering what the hell I’m on about. But having now experienced it twice, I’m sure there’s something going on with subtle body language signals.

In other news of Gavin and Yuko’s relocation… me and Yuko ended up watching (and recording) Rick Stein’s TV show that was shown on Tuesday night. Pretty interesting, though Yuko and I were desperate to eat some really nice sushi and sashimi after watching it. The good thing about the programme though was that Yuko and I got the chance to learn the English names for fish, which currently we only only know how to say in Japanese (this says a lot about how much fish I used to eat before I went to Japan… I speak more Japanese than English when it comes to fish names). So, know we know what to try and get, we will have to try and get it!

Anyway, enough rambling, what else have I seen around.

Ahhh, as you can see, Japan is just like the UK. Need some extra policing powers, simply, put fear into the local indiginous population about foreigners committing crime. In the UK, it’s those strange Muslim types. In Japan, well, it’s ALL those foreign types (especially the damn Chinese and Koreans) if you believe anything that Ishihara tells you.

Looks like Abe is still pushing Japan to become a more powerful regional power. Is this part of the worrying nationalist trends in some elements of the Japanese government? Actually, I think it’s quite a complex issue. I think Japan has reason to be concerned, and needs to improve it’s ability to defend itself with the ‘threat’ from China… but I worry about Nationalist abusing any extra military strength and powers that Japan would aquire.

Ahhh, seems there’s a large proportion (well, in this less than scientific study anyway) of Japanese seem to think Japan is the ONLY country in the world that has 4 seasons! As the author of the post on the linked website said, it’s a bit of running joke amoungst foreigners resident in Japan.

Quite an amazing little story.

I remember seeing a story about Paris Syndrome a while back, but always thought it was just an urban myth. Well, reading the BBC story, it seems that the Japanese Embassy in Paris actually has to repatriate distraught Japanese when their mental image of Paris turns out to be a complete myth. Strange, but true it seems?

Bloody hell. A 30% population decrease in 50 years!. That what Japan is facing based on current projections. In the ‘current’ capitalistic world, this would be a disaster for Japan. We are looking at an economic implosion… except of course, it’s pretty much a certainty (exact date is not a certainty) the whole planet is looking at a collapse of the capitalistic economic system. So, I guess the Japanese are going to have 30 million less people to feed. Factor in that the probably life expectancy would decrease, and maybe Japan will end up with a population demographic that resembles how nature intended it to look.

Ahhh, only in Japan. In the UK and most of Western Society… geeks in Stormtrooper outfits scare away girls. In Japan, geeks in Stormtrooper outfit gets to pose with attractive girls wearing bikinis!

And finally… Gordon Brown may have a challenger for the Labour Party leadership. Now, I happen to think that all UK politicians (well, maybe not all, but most) are idiots with no long term vision or planning (I mean, doing unpopular things for long-term prosperity… nah, can’t be doing that since we’d be unelectable… f**k it, lets just something stupid but popular to get/keep in power).
Anyway, Meacher it turns out is a bit of a Peak Oiler. So, even though he won’t become the next leader of the Labour party, I hope he uses this opportunity to get the message out to the public at large. We’ll see.

Right, that’s it. Tomorrow is my last day in the office, before a week off for Christmas. Wooohooo.

Ahhh, an improvement in the weather this weekend… sunny, with a little chill in the air. So, we headed down into down to check out Cardiff centre to look around the place and get some more Xmas shopping done. The centre was heaving, so wasn’t that fun at times. We did have a cracking snack for lunch though. Very nice hog roast and stuffing roll served up in one of the stalls in the special Xmas market they have on at the moment.

We pretty much spent most of the afternoon there, before we headed off to a quiet pub/bar just on the outside of the central part of Cardiff. That was pretty much to kill time, before we headed off to a Portugese restaurant for food that evening. Pretty good, considering there was a big party going on in there at the time. We’ll probably head back there after the the holidays to test out the place again.

Sunday was a chilled out day. Headed down to the centre again, to check out the small farmers market. Some pretty good stuff there too, which we’ll be eating through the week. We figure that by shopping from the main central market and this farmers market, we’ll be cutting down on our food shop from Sainsbury. All we need know are the bikes, so we don’t have to take the bus into the centre.

Finally got an internet connection at home, a little bit slower than the 45Mb we used to have. This one is a data modem card, since getting a fixed line broadband connection would be cost prohibitive if we are not going to stay in this rented accomodation for a long period of time. We can pick up a 1.4Mb signal apparently, but I suspect actual transfer rates are anywhere between 340ish Kb to that 1.4Mb figure. Not bad, considering that fixed line broadband in the outskirts of Cardiff is only 512Mb anyway!!!
My mail is all up and running on my user account. Yuko’s one still has a few problems (she can’t recieve email), so I suspect it’s some form of wierd port blocking on the device. I need to play around with those settings before the Mac is fully ‘Net Operational’ for her.

Anyway, in todays other news I saw on the Internet.

Oil

Peak? Well, it seems OPEC is cutting production again in February.

Also, there was an interesting little snippet in the Nov/Dec OPEC Bulletin…

The question of ‘peak oil’

This conclusion seems to be in line with the view held by the peak oil output advocates who argue that the ongoing oil price rises are mainly due to supply-demand imbalances. This is because we are at, or near, the production peak of world oil, if not on the downward slope of the Hubbert’s peak curve. This is not to deny the role of other factors (such as geopolitical), but only to stress the importance of supply and demand for crude oil as the prime factor in determining the price of the commodity.

The comments in bold are quite a statement to come from an OPEC man.

Happenings in Japan

Seems the Au(KDDI) bandwagon rolls on. Not suprising really, and DoCoMo are the ones who are really getting hurt by hit. Wouldn’t suprise me to see Au eventually become the No.1 mobile operator in Japan.
Meanwhile, this was a pretty horrific story…

Dammit… Apple Japan is ‘giving’ away a fair bit of nice kit for a lower price it seems.

May have to contact one of my collegues (from my old dept.), who is in Japan for 4 months taking over from me, to go down to Ginza and pick up some goodies. Assuming of course he’s not too busy chatting up and dating the pretty girls in the office, damn him, the young single whipper-snapper.

Yuko was in a good mood today. She excitedly texted me around about lunchtime, saying she’s found out that a store in Cardiff market is selling 海胆[Uni] or Sea Urchin. Yuko loves Uni, me… I’m rather not fussed about it. Then again, eventually in a few years I may end liking it. It took me 2 years to aquire a taste for raw oyster (and then, it has to be done in a good place only, and served with Japanese style ポン酢[Ponzu] dressing. Anyway, we’ll be eating fish tomorrow… woohooo (my goodness. What has Japan done to me. My folks will be shocked, as I was never really a fish eating person, apart from the odd bit of cod).

Following on from yesterdays post, I see there is some more USB madness with more pointless USB devices.

Also, this story gave me a little chuckle.