From: Jon Lasser
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 1:37 PM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Japan tourist details

Eating:

• Kaffe Essen, about a block past TCAT on the same side of the street. The morning service is perfect coffee, toast, egg, and salad for 450 yen.
• Kanda Yabu Soba is listed in the Lonely Planet book. Fabulous buckwheat noodles, hot or cold (cold is traditional), in a lovely old building where the waitresses sing the orders to the kitchen.
• Sakata is also listed in the Lonely Planet book. They do Udon noodles that are pretty incredible. It's near Ginza, and I recommend sitting at the bar and chatting with people.
• The Ginza Lion is also, not surprisingly, near Ginza. They're a German-style beer hall -- sit downstairs, order food, most of which you can recognize, and look at the lovely mosaics on the wall. http://www.ginzalion.jp/
• I also mentioned Gyoza Stadium, part of Namjatown, a theme park in the Sunshine City office complex. It's a bit far away, but if you're in that part of town for some other reason, it's fun. Lots of little stalls with a zillion kinds of dumplings. It costs a little to get in.

Except for Kaffe Essen (where they do understand "morning service" and "coffee") and Gyoza Stadium (where pointing is sufficient), the places above all have English menus. In general, it's perfectly acceptable to take the server out to the window and point at the plastic models of food, if you can't otherwise communicate. I do recommend trying that once at someplace that doesn't speak English; you'll get more interesting food that way. Make sure you have lots of little pickles -- the Japanese have an incredible array of delicious pickles, from salted plums to cucumbers to cabbage to squash.

Of course, relying on [Redacted]-san for lunch selection is always recommended. I don't think I had more than a couple of disappointing meals in Japan, but none of them were with him.

Sightseeing:

• Senso-Ji, in Asakusa, is a large complex with a Buddhist temple and a whole bunch of Shinto shrines. Out front is a market with lots of little stalls good for picking up touristy things (or umbrellas if it suddenly started raining), and there are often food stalls with tasty treats. I had a tasty okonomiyaki -- basically a pancake full of bonito flakes, pork, ginger, scallions and other bits -- from one of the vendors off to the side of the temple. You're also likely to find Takoyaki there, a tasty deep-fried ball of dough with octopus bits, doused in bonito flakes. They're frequently almost too hot to eat when you get them, and highly recommended. Near Senso-ji is Kappabashi-dori, the restaurant supply street. It's a good place to pick up inexpensive chopsticks, and to check out the (not at all cheap) plastic food models you see in restaurant windows.
• Meiji-jingu is the shrine to the Meiji emperor. It's a huge, forested park in the middle of Tokyo. Check out the shrine itself, wander around, and maybe check out the treasure museum, too. Outside of Meiji-jingu is Harajuku bridge, over the train tracks to Harajuku station. Harajuku bridge is where all of the cosplay kids hang out -- best time to check it out is weekend afternoons, but after school probably works too.
• The Japan Traditional Craft Center is off near Namjatown, and has lots of neat handcrafts. Often there are demonstrations of traditional techniques -- I saw them working on kimono fabric on looms, when I was there. Like Gyoza stadium, it's more something to do if you're already in that part of town than a destination on its own.
• Ginza, the shopping district, at night. Just go out and see the lights turning dark into day. Especially in Ginza, go into the larger department stores. They're exquisite -- almost more like museums than shops. Mitsukoshi and Matsuya seemed to me particularly worth seeing.
• Hakuhinkan Toy Park is also in the Ginza area, and is where I picked up the iFish. It's about five stories of toy shopping, and fun. They do have a no-tax counter if you're buying more than $100 of stuff -- be sure to bring your passport for that!
• Don't discount the area around the hotel. The Royal Park has a "Seven Shrines of Nihonbashi" pamphlet containing a nice walk around the neighborhood where you can see many of the shrines. This will put you in the actual neighborhood, which is a great place to look around and see a less touristy part of Tokyo than any of the above.

Getting Around / Etiquette / Etc.

• The recommendations from the Lonely Planet guide were pretty good overall. I mostly stuck to the subway rather than the JR lines, though after navigating to Kyoto and back I would be more comfortable taking the JR in the future.
• The hotel room will have the subway map like the one Jerry has on the wall, with Romanized stop names and numbers. The subway is ridiculously easy if you have this map and know the name of your destination: the lines have colors, and the stations are numbered sequentially, so it's easy to figure out which way to go. I only made one mistake with this between two trips.
• People are unbelievably helpful. If you're lost, don't hesitate to ask passers-by for help -- you'll receive it, almost certainly.
• Never leave a train station without looking at the map, figuring out what exit to leave by. Also, read and study the section in the Lonely Planet book on decoding the three-part street addresses used in Tokyo.
• I didn't really have any major etiquette faux pas that anybody let me know about. Try to be polite, do a lot of half-bowing, and you'll probably be all right.
• As we've discussed, at least in work situations people are very unlikely to tell you that they don't understand. The body language is fairly different around this as well. You'll probably want to ask people many very specific questions in order to ascertain whether or not they understand not only your words but the meanings.

I wonder if some apartment buildings limit dogs to certain floors. It's more forgiving than blanket permission, but also gives people who prefer to be dog-free some choices as well.

Moreover, people are much slower at checking themselves out than an experienced cashier is. Oodles more slow.

So why do I stand in that line, then, with the inherent inferiority?

Because it's one line to four registers: even if each person checking out is a third the speed, and the line is the same length as the others (it's frequently shorter), I still save time.

One line for all of the cashier-managed registers (a la Fry's and the Post Office) would have me back there in no time. Of course, that's fine with QFC.

(Tip of the hat to my co-worker Ron Dubois, from whose mouth the term came.)

The prices themselves are nominal — 1980 is equal to 100, and everything else is relative to that. Oil prices are yearly averages. So the graph displays what 100 arbitrary units of housing cost, in barrels of oil.

The most interesting visual event is the collapse in oil prices in 1998, following the Asian economic blowout. Housing prices jump as oil prices crash, but two years later, we're right back in the thick of things. Other than that, the range seems relatively narrow, without too many visually stunning features.

Perhaps deeper analysis would yield more interesting results, but the relatively constant ratio (even in the face of large hikes in oil prices, and a supposed housing bubble) seems interesting to me: are changes in the prices of both housing and oil so tied to inflation as a whole, or to the value of the dollar on the world market, that they move largely in tandem, except in the face of gigantic international events? Does this mean that there isn't a housing bubble? What about peak oil? How does that change things?

For me, seeing that housing prices are and have been declining since 2002 — the year after the dot-com bust and 9/11 — feels rather sobering. Maybe 2003 wasn't a terrible time to sell my house.

What does the future hold? If the housing bubble pops and peak oil causes oil prices to rise, housing prices (denominated in oil) will be further depressed. But what, if anything, does that mean in the real world?

As to my methods, I found a chart of changes in housing prices in the U.S., from 1985 through 2005 on the OFHEO site, in their 4th quarter 2005 report. (I used the fourth quarter prices.) Elsewhere, I found a chart of crude oil prices in the Illinois basin area; while not exactly equal to prices elsewhere, they seemed close enough for what I wanted to attempt. I used their yearly average prices; probably I should have averaged their fourth quarter, but I'm not an economist. My original spreadsheet is also available, if you care.

Pardon my naive economics, and my naive math; I thought that this was interesting, despite my technical limitations in those fields,

One-stop wedding planning, with a walk-through covered by red arrows on the floor: "First, the venue: is it a church? a park? a hall? Or have you already confirmed a venue? Should we call your Church and schedule a date with them for you? Second, an officiant: Would you like a priest, a rabbi, a non-denominational Christian minister, a justice of the peace, or have you already confirmed an officiant?"

And so on and so forth, stopping at each booth along the line to pick a reception venue, a band or DJ for that venue, the guest list (with automated voice-mail RSVP system, and counting, so that reservations can be automatically confirmed with all venues, caterers, etc.), decisions about cake and food, to select gifts for guests, outfits for bridesmaids, and so on. Move on down the line, get to the cash register, and put down a deposit.

It might be less care than the personalized services of a wedding planner, but it would probably be good enough for many people, and probably less hassle to get it all out of the way at once.

It could be lots of fun to have a theme park where all the rides were versions of well-known video games. Platform-style games could be easily adapted to thrill rides, fun zones, and the like.

Sephora does stock a wide variety of men's colognes, but it seems to me that they're really being marketed to women to buy as a gift for men. Rather than sort the fragrances by designer, separate them into three or four sections, by attitude or scent-family: "rugged," "woodsy," "urbane," "spicy," or some other meaningless division.

Color the walls behind each section a different, masculine color. Pair up the fragrances with aftershaves, and deodorants, so guys can buy the whole set. Put little tags below each scent, describing it, for guys who don't trust themselves to smell properly.

And, while you're at it, push more high-end shaving products. Talk men into fancy, old-school razors, gleaming chrome, brushes, double-edged razor blades. Make it classic, and classy. Make men feel like chumps if they don't spend time and money on this sort of grooming.

After all, there's a captive audience of men who are in the shop anyway; you might as well take a few extra feet of wall-space and target them.

What's a working mom to do for her daughter? Hire a professional locker decorator!

What, there aren't any yet? Start one!