rant

Yesterday saw the introduction of compulsory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering Japan. Similar to the US Visit programme which similarly treats all foreign visitors as potential terrorists, the system will store your data (unless you are Japanese) indefinitely in a database. Sharing the data with the US has not been ruled out either.

Not being a big fan of this system at all, I decided to attend an Amnesty International organised protest outside the Japanese Justice Ministry in Kasumigaseki yesterday. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of foreigners in Tokyo, the 100 odd turnout (both foreigners and Japanese) was a bit pathetic. Respect to those who turned up though - with the huge media contingent and the small number of people protesting, each person was making a very public stand against this ridiculous policy.

Below are some photos taken at the demonstration.



This is from the middle of the protest - there was a trickle of people turning up so the final number was probably about 100. Some ordinary people gave some very passionate, heartfelt speeches. One woman despaired that she had been married to a Japanese man for 45 years, had Japanese children and grand-children but would be treated like a criminal from now on when returning to her home in Japan. Some 'Zainichi' Koreans pointed out that not all Zainichi had the status that would exempt them from this measure. They also explained that family members in Korea will now refuse to visit Japan because of this new law. Given the importance of places like Korea and China as sources for inbound tourism, this is going to have a big impact.



I have never seen so many media in a single place. There goes the anonymity of being part of a crowd. If there was a government snoop with a camera there then I might have got myself on a list of dangerous subversives!



The police were generally well behaved. They were very silly about people crossing the chain at the top of the steps and approaching the building though. A mother with a child in a baby buggy was told that she could not stay on their side of the chain and that she had to join the crowd on the other side.

Read more about this issue at Arudo Debito's blog.

The opening of Krispy Kreme's second Tokyo branch in a basement in Yurakucho goes to show that there are thousands of people in Tokyo with absolutely nothing better to do on a Sunday than line up for one hour and forty-five minutes for a doughnut.



This photo was taken a couple of weekends ago. Presumably the wait is down to less than an hour and a half by now.

Just when you thought it was insane to queue for hours and hours to buy doughnuts, how about queuing for hours to buy doughnuts then lugging six boxes of them for five hours on the train up to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture?! On a recent visit to said place, I spotted the family below. There's actually another bag hidden that is the same size as the one you can see - almost half their baggage was doughnuts!



Along with queuing for hours for each ride at Tokyo Disney, it would seem that queuing at Krispy Kreme is now also an essential part of the Tokyo experience for visitors to the big city.

This did get me thinking though. After watching the excellent Canadian documentary 'The Corporation' and in particular a piece about 'undercover marketing', it struck me that it could actually make good sense for a company to PAY PEOPLE TO QUEUE! In Japan, long, long queues are recognised as a sign of the success and popularity of a store. Perhaps in contrast to the west, queues attract people rather than put them off. So, paying 200 students 800yen an hour to queue up outside my store for 8 hours a day, for two days, would only cost about 2.5 million yen. Hopefully, after two days, the paid queuers would be replaced by the real article and suddenly I'd be generating huge free publicity.

According to Trans Pacific Radio, one hour long waits still persist at Krispy Kreme's Shinjuku branch. It would be appropriate to finish with a quote from Homer Simpson 'Hmmm... Donuts', but I don't actually like them so that would be insincere.

Engrish is kind of funny when it's on a t-shirt but this is just baffling! This screen gives payment instructions for using a locker in the Galleria shopping centre at Tokyo Midtown. Luckily I didn't actually need to use it - I was bored, so I decided to press some buttons!

Construction company Kajima has just opened a 16 storey addition to their Akasaka headquarters. As part of the new development, they have transformed an alley way that links the Tameike-Sanno neighbourhood to Akasaka 6-chome.

Before, the alley was about as dark and obscured as Kajima's business practices. Now it's a broad well lit pathway with a sheer concrete wall on one side.

Being from New Zealand, one of my first thoughts was ...hmmm.. that would be a great wall for graffiti! (Not that I would ever entertain the idea of actually graffitiing the wall myself.) It's similar to the uneasy feeling I get walking past an empty, parked BMW with windows down and the engine running. It would be so easy!

This being Japan, I would be very surprised if someone graffitied the wall. And I think that's probably one of the best things about living in Japan.

A story about Japanese being scammed by a company selling sheep as poodles has received (and as of this writing continues to receive) wide coverage in newspapers, websites and blogs throughout Australia, New Zealand, the US and Britain. News outlets that have published this story include the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the New Zealand Herald, USA Today and the (not surprising) source - The Sun.

This story is so blatantly, obviously fake! The telling thing is that all of these media outlets couldn't see past the whacky/crazy Japanese stereotype to see the implausibility of this. I would hazard a guess that if the headline had been 'Britons mistake Sheep for Poodles in pet shop scam' that all the editors would have instantly doubted the veracity of this story. It would seem that Orientalism is alive and kicking.

To their credit, Australia's Nine MSN has acknowledged that the sheep as poodle story is 'probably' fake. Funny how a story highlighting the supposed gullibility of the Japanese has instead backfired and exposed the gullibility of western news editors. Beautiful!

According to the Daily Yomiuri, land prices in Minami-Aoyama (the very same block where my office is located) have gone up 45.5% in a year!. Perhaps not just co-incidentally, two hand bag shops have moved into our quiet street in the last year. Stranger still, these shops NEVER have any customers in them! Unless they're just a front for Columbian drug cartels (there must be some reason for the ridiculously high prices) these stores would seem to exist purely for the vanity of having a Minami-Aoyama address. Therefore, if these bag companies run into any kind of financial problems, they're going to be dropping these shops as quick as if they had just been handed a (non-branded) bag of cold sick. Therefore, I think it's a bubble!

In possibly related news, it would appear that there is also a boom of sorts in the height of young Japanese. Recently I snapped this picture in Akasaka-Mitsuke Station. It reads '(ceiling) height 2.25 metres, watch your head'. Must be all the dairy products.

Early last week, a rather nasty piece of xenophobia entitled 'Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu' (Underground Foreigner Crime Files) went on sale with national distribution through such mainstream outlets as Family Mart, Amazon Japan and an online affiliate of 7 Eleven.

If you want to know more about what was in the 'mook' - a magazine/book, check out tireless foreigners rights advocate Arudo Debito's blog or Japanprobe.

Although the publication raises a lot of questions, the most remarkable thing is that an organised campaign by foreign residents led to it's withdrawal and a couched apology from Family Mart (even though Amazon continues to hold-out). Following the various blogs it was interesting to see the standard corporate responses to the initial complaints and then the rapid change when they realised the scale of what they were dealing with and the potential damage to their reputation and sales.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the foreign community in Japan has launched a rapid, co-ordinated and ultimately successful campaign to influence a national retailer. Lacking a critical mass, (according to the latest edition of Metropolis, Oizumi town in Yamanashi has the highest percentage of foreign residents with a mere 15%) it has been difficult for foreign residents to influence the communities in which they live. However, with the popularity, speed and ease of communication afforded by blogs, we could be seeing the birth of an influential foreign voice - both as a powerful consumer block and as an agent for change in Japanese society.

Interesting how something so negative can inadvertently lead to something so positive!

Although I stated in the raison d'etre of this blog that I wasn't going to comment on societal issues, I just had to mention something about this 'war'.

On Monday this week, a senior member of the Sumiyoshi-syndicate was shot and killed by assailants on a motorbike outside Roppongi Hills. The only reason this worries me is because there is at least one Yakuza office on Akasaka Dori - which I can't avoid walking past on my way to and from the station. Actually, I probably wouldn't have given this another thought usually - except that there is (since Monday) a lone policeman outside the office wearing body armour, a helmet and standing behind a shield that wouldn't look out of place in the kit of a medieval foot soldier! I would have taken a photo, but I'm a coward and I'd rather not be questioned by the police - or the other guys.

It makes you wonder if the police are actually cracking down on the gangs or just positioning officers (security guards?) outside their offices to deter reprisals.