On my last post Aceface asked:

Hey,why not write some more about the garden state for non American readers for this is travelogue afterall.
I’m wondering what becomes of the turnpike after nearly quater of a century of my absence from New Jersey.Is Great Adventure(of the six flags theme park) still there?What happened to Flushing/Fort Lee Japan town that I’ve heard it is now changed as Taiwan/Korea town?I really really miss New Jersey!

You should come visit then!

I did just do a NYC related post the other day, and when I start carrying my camera around more you may see more local things. But if you really need a New Jersey fix, I recommend Weird New Jersey. Get some copies of the physical magazine if you can, it’s loads of fun.

The Turnpike is pretty much the same. They briefly discussed privatizing it before people realized it was just a cash infusion with no real long term gain or service enhancements. I believe tokens have been completely phased out- the toll is 35 cents cash, or in some areas 70 cents but only in one direction (to improve traffic flow the other way) and most people who use it more than once in a blue moon have EZ-PASS, a battery powered radio transducer box that sits on your dashboard or sticks to the windshield up by the rear-view mirror and passes your account information wirelessly to the toll booth as you drive through, making the whole payment process way easier. To get one of these boxes you pay a small deposit ($20?) and get a free replacement when the battery runs low. There is an electronic sign that warns you when your account is low on money.

Six Flags is still there, I have not been since I was in 8th grade though.

Flushing is Chinese and Korean. I don’t know if there are many Taiwanese there or not, but Cantonese still go to Manhattan Chinatown, and Chinatown definitely has a Taiwanese presence still. I was there last week and saw a sign for the USA headquarters of the KMT, and there was also a sign in the window with Lien Chan’s (連戰) name on it.

I feel like Fort Lee is almost all Korean, but also Japanese still live in the Fort Lee/Edgewater area. There is a Japanese supermarket/shopping center there in Edgewater, which used to have a Kinokuniya branch, but I think now has some other bookstore in its place. I haven’t been to Fort Lee or Flushing this year, so I haven’t got any current personal observations.

In NYC, St Marks Place, the former locus of punk culture in the region (a culture which has taken a near mortal blow with the passing of CBGB’s), is now the closest thing to a Japanese area in the city, with at least a half dozen izakaya type places on just the one block, and a little Japanese market around the corner to the north, which is on the second floor above a bookstore (elevator access), and sells Japanese products. I believe last week I saw a sign down the street to the north-west that Kinokuniya was either opening a second location near there, or perhaps moving from their old Rockefeller location, which makes sense. I doubt many Japanese are hanging out over there these days, compared to the numbers you see every day in the Village.

One of these places, which I was at last week, is labeled as something like “日本帝國居酒屋” (Japanese Empire Izakaya – although I forget the place’s actual name), with lots of old-timey Showa-period kitch and decoration, like old posters, antique pachinko machines, etc. Signs with random vaguely pro-Japanese imperialist slogans and phrases, also written on the t-shirts worn by staff, such as “神風特攻隊.” (Kamikaze special attack squad) In the men’s bathroom, next to the mirror, there was a red sign that just says “長崎原爆.” (Nagasaki Nuclear Bomb) This is also the only place I have ever seen outside of Japan that has “Hoppy” on the menu- and even in Japan it’s usually just places going for an oldy-timey kind of mood. (This paragraph is taken from some comments I just made on a tangentially related topic at Neomarxisme.)

Update: the friend I went with reminds me the place is called ケンカ, meaning “to argue.” They also have an actual stuffed tanuki inside, posed to look like the cartoonish tanuki statues you often see in Japan, which is both a little awesome and a little creepy.

There are of course many, many other Japanese restaurants and bars throughout the city, which there’s really no need to discuss. There are also a few other Japanese markets/stores of note, but actually for Japanese food products your best bet is probably a Korean store, some of which are much bigger and carry a large amount of food and drinks from Japan. Of special note is the NYC branch of Japanese used bookstore mega-chain Book Off, located on 41st St, just south of Grand Central Station, and just east of the public library. Just down the block from Book Off is a Japanese restaurant, a Japanese bakery/cafe, with some of the sorts of baked goods that you normally only see in bakeries in Japan, and a Japanese market/lunch place that does things like katsudon for eat-in or take-away.

Anyone else have some observations to share for Aceface’s NY/NJ travel guide?

That’s a whole course! Maybe for my wedding party I should volunteer 1/5 of my wedding meals to get sent to North Korea.

Other stats from this Shukan Toyo Keizai article:

Average cost of a wedding: more than 3 million yen (US$25,000) in 2006. The cost of weddings has been rising since 2003, when the Japanese economy started turning around. (Source: wedding planning site Zexy.net)

Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) researched how much food is left uneated at wedding parties (披露宴 routinely make up 3/4 of the cost of an entire wedding) by surveying 40 wedding halls nationwide. The figure of 22.5% (19.2% when you exclude drinks) is light-years away from the amount of food left uneaten at home (1.1% according to a 2005 survey) or in restaurants (3.1% as of 2006). And it’s a high percentage even compared to food at regular banquet-style parties (宴会) that offer alcohol, 15.2% of which goes to waste.

Perhaps that has something to do with the sheer amount of food served at wedding parties, which is averages an enormous 2230g—almost four times the average 600g served at cafeterias and restaurants. That means people who simply can’t finish more than what they usually eat in an entire day are wasting an entire meal’s worth of food, or 500g.

Why so much food? The STK conjectures that since people want to give their guests the best possible service, it’s either become a tradition or people are trying to be ostentatious by offering more food than necessary. But as someone planning a wedding party myself, I think the most obvious explanation is that the event halls need to justify charging 10,000 yen per plate plus open bar charges.

How to live cheaply in one of the world’s most expensive cities? Well, it really isn’t that expensive unless you want it to be, and I will submit that living a broke life in Tokyo is MUCH better than living a broke life anywhere in America.

Here are some ideas:

Lodging

This is the big kahuna that makes life in Tokyo expensive. If you want a swank apartment in the middle of the city, it might set you back ¥400,000 a month. Fortunately, there are cheaper ways to do things.

• Best way: seduce someone of your preferred gender who has a nice apartment. If they’re female, they’ll even make you breakfast in the morning! (And if they don’t, find one who will; Japan is a buyer’s market.)
• Stay with a host family. You get conversation, you probably get meals, and you might even get your laundry done. On the other hand, host families have their drawbacks; you can’t go out partying late at night, and they might turn out to be batshit crazy. (I never had the former problem in high school; I definitely had the latter problem.)
• Get a place in the middle of nowhere, like a ¥40,000 room in Nishi-nippori located a cool 20-minute bus ride from the Yamanote Line.
• If you insist on living in the middle of the city, you can ditch your bathroom and live in a 6-mat room 5 minutes away from Shibuya for the same price. Granted, you have to go to a sento to clean yourself up, and your toilet is shared… but still!
• By the way, Yahoo! Japan Real Estate is an excellent resource for scouting out really cheap places to stay, assuming you know enough Japanese to navigate around. If English is your only language (or if you aren’t staying for a year or so), you might be relegated to the hell that is Sakura House.

Food

• There are always noodle products, of course, and those sketchy pasta sauces they sell in foil pouches at Don Quijote. Yum!
• If you want slightly better food, you can live on a diet of convenience store bentos, gyudon and curry for under ¥2,000 a day. Pretty easy, if not all that healthy.
• If you’re into eating out, my advice would be to get used to having big lunches. Many of the smaller restaurants around the business districts of Tokyo will sell you a massive lunch prepared with good ingredients for ¥1,000 or less. Then you can make your other calories for the day more or less blank.
• One of the best money-savers out there—as much as it might pain some of you to consider it—is to avoid booze. “What you say! No drinking in Japan? Heresy!” But it’s true: consider that a beer or chuhai will cost you ¥300 even at a cheap place.

Transportation

This one is easy. Ditch the subway and get yourself a bicycle. You might still want to hop on the Metro when it’s raining, but biking around is a great way to see the city, burn some calories and save some money. (I was spending ¥5,000 a month on Metro cards before I got my bike; at ¥10,000 it paid for itself after two nice winter/spring months, although it got pretty unbearable during the summer. If you have a cheap sento near your workplace, go for it! If you work at a sento, double points!)

It’s like all the best chain stores suddenly found out I was coming to Japan and decided they needed to step up:

Monday, February 26, 2007

U.S. Bakery Chain Au Bon Pain To Enter Japan In Summer

NEW YORK (Nikkei)—U.S. bakery cafe chain operator Au Bon Pain plans to open its first store in Japan this summer under a franchise agreement with Reins International Inc., company sources said.

The cafe will offer such items as bread, sandwiches and coffee. Au Bon Pain aims to increase the number of outlets to 300 in five years.

Reins International, a group company of Rex Holdings Co. (2688) and operator of the Gyu-Kaku chain of grilled beef restaurants, plans to open the first cafe in a Tokyo business district. It will begin introducing outlets in other major cities from next year.

The Boston-based Au Bon Pain operates about 230 cafes in the U.S., mostly in urban areas. It has also begun opening outlets in such Asian economies as Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea.
(Nikkei)

I’m not a huge fan of this place, but I know MF is. Hey, why not. Hopefully they will have good bagels. I don’t think I can realistically hope it will be cheap since it’s a big ripoff in Washington.

Great news: Yoshinoya plans to sell its famous gyudon beef bowl dish until midnight every night starting March 1, extending it from the previous cutoff of 3pm. So that means when I get back to Japan in April, the green tea donuts will be gone and I can have real Yoshinoya almost whenever I want it. Yessss

Regular readers of the blog will remember Adamu’s saliva-speckled posts on Krispy Kreme donuts. Well, I’ve just found out via Michael Turton’s blog that Dunkin Donuts recently announced plans to expand into Taiwan, and then eventually through them into China. As far as I know, this will make Taiwan the second country after the Philippines to have both a Dunkin Donuts and a Mister Donut franchise, a condition that if you know the history of both companies suggests an incongruity of much the same character as the fact that light is both a wave and a particle.

Before coming to Japan I had never heard of Mr Donut, and was a bit incredulous when I was first told that it was originally an American company. Noticing that their advertising makes notes of the fact that it was started in San Francisco Chinatown (some locations have Chinese-y menu items like dumplings or noodles to play off of this), I assumed that it was just one of those American chains which, despite being fairly big regionally, had just never made it from one coast to the other. Except for wishing, whenever I passed a Mr Donut in Japan, that it was a Dunkin’ Donuts instead, I never thought of them again until I moved to Taiwan to study Chinese in 2004.

I arrived in Taipei in May, apparently no more than a couple of months after the introduction of Mr Donut to Taiwan. Unlike in Japan, where it was nothing but a common vendor of sweet and sometimes sticky pastries, Mr Donuts in Taiwan was a phenomenon, with desperate young consumers waiting on lines so snakishly long that they were later to be my frame of reference when my rarely present nominal flatmate Dmitri described to me the experience of waiting in line to get into that first Pushkin Square McDonalds to open in Russia after perestroika.

Having been impressed by the utter ordinariness of Mr Donuts product in Japan, I was rather shocked by the amount of enthusiasm there was for the product here, until I noticed the promotion campaign. To see what the centerpiece of that campaign is, just visit out the Mr Donut Taiwan web site and check out the title:

Mister Donut Japan No.1 Donut Shop

While in Japan the brand image of Mr Donut is based around its American-ness, with a minor strain of Chinese-ness from the San Francisco heritage, Mister Donut Taiwan is being promoted entirely on the basis of its popularity in Japan. While Taiwan certainly has nothing against American products or fast food, the Japanese link has a much stronger association with the high class. For one illustrative example of how the Japanese image is helpful for marketing in Taiwan, notice how dry cleaning stores are always labeled as “Japanese style dry cleaning,” despite (to my knowledge at least) there being any particular historic link between Japan and dry cleaning. We can also see an interesting choice in the removal of any marketing or products associated with Chinatown. After all, why would the idea of third-rate Japanified Americanized Dim-sum be remotely appealing in a city where you can find the same type of thing at lower prices and higher quality in almost any direction you turn?

If you look at the order and location in which stores were opened in Taipei, you can see a clear attempt by the planners of Mr Donut Taiwan to instill establish Mr Donut as a high class brand.
(1) Tianmu – a high class neighborhood with many expensive stores.
(2) Breeze Center – A department store. I don’t know if it’s Japanese owned, but it has a strongly Japanese style to it, and even contains the Taipei branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya.
(3) New York, New York – High end shopping center located at the base of Taipei 101, currently the tallest skyscraper in the world.
(4) Taipei Station – Not actual in the station, but in the underground shopping center, right by the door connecting it with the neighboring Shin-Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store.
After this they began branching out into somewhat less stylish areas, and now have a total of 17 stores including one in Xinzhu and three in Gaoxiong, but by associating the early stores both with high class shopping districts and Japan, the company did an excellent job of beginning to establish their brand as something more more at the level of Starbucks than McDonalds.

By now you may be thinking, but didn’t this start with Dunkin’ Donuts, not Mr Donuts? Well, let’s look briefly of the history of these two brands.

Mister Donut was founded by Harry Winokur in 1956 and had locations across most of North America.

Mister Donut was the largest competitor to Dunkin’ Donuts, which was founded by Harry Winokur’s brother-in-law William Rosenberg in 1950, prior to being acquired by Dunkin’ Donuts’ parent company, Allied-Lyons, in February 1990.

After the acquisition of Mister Donut by Allied-Lyons, all Mister Donut locations within North America were offered the chance to change their name to Dunkin’ Donuts. Now only a scattered few locations still hold the name Mister Donut.

In 1983, Duskin Co. Ltd of Japan acquired the rights to franchise Mister Donut throughout Japan and Asia. Mister Donut is the largest donut chain operating in Japan.

[From Wikipedia]
For some reason there remain sixteen Mr Dont locations in the United States that have not transitioned to the Dunkin’ Donuts brand, but for all intents and purposes they are now a Japanese company, under the aegis of Duskin Co. Ltd., and the Mr Donut brand has spread to the Philippines, and now Taiwan, as an offshoot of the Japanese company. There was a Dunkin Donuts operation in Japan for a time, run as a joint venture with D&C, the holding company of the internationally famous Yoshinoya brand, but currently the only East Asian country with Dunkin Donuts is South Korea, although it is quite common in Thailand, and in the Philippines one can even find Dunkin Donuts right next door to Mr Donut. Will we ever see such a site in Taiwan? Will Dunkin’ Donuts take hold? Will we ever see Krispy Kreme opening in a vacated Mr Donuts shop next to Taipei 101?

For a good taste of Taiwan’s Mr Donut hysteria, circa February 2005, check out this Taipei Times article. For a taste of how they may fare in the future, check out this man on the street interview from the very same article.

“It’s the best donut you can get in Taiwan, but it’s not as good as Dunkin Donuts,” Fu told the Taipei Times. “If someone bought some for me, I’d eat it,” he said, but indicated that he would not buy the doughnut again for himself.

I’m sure everyone has seen the famous Sushi documentary by The Rahmens, but did you know that there actually were others in the series? I found two more on youtube, sadly with no subtitles but still good for anyone who can understand them.

日本の形：土下座

日本の形：交際（ラーメンズ）（1/3）
日本の形：交際（ラーメンズ）（2/3）
日本の形：交際（ラーメンズ）（3/3）

As a total atheist and a Jew, Christmas means absolutely nothing to me except for school vacation, annoying music, and an annual party at my friend Alistair’s house, but for some reason it has made a huge impression throughout the world, even in many countries like Japan where Christianity is virtually nonexistent. I’m not going to try and do any boring analysis about why, but I want to show two different news stories that discuss Christmas in Japan.

First, we have this really boring article about Santa Claus, written for Slate by David Plotz.

In Japan, a department store recently stumbled into the yuletide spirit by displaying Santa Claus—nailed to a crucifix.

This would be a pretty funny mistake if it were true, but it only took me ten seconds of fact checking (typing “Japan crucifix santa” into Google and finding a thorough Snopes.com article debunking this story) to find that it never actually happened.

Then we have this “foreigners eat weird food”Reuters article from Reuters, which tells us the incredible truth that people living in countries without Turkey don’t eat Turkey on Christmas! (I thought Christmas was ham or goose anyway? Aren’t most Americans still sick of turkey from Thanksgiving?) Anyway, here are the Japan bits:

In Japan, many people head to Kentucky on Christmas—Kentucky Fried Chicken, that is.

The fast food joints do a roaring trade over the Christmas period, with restaurants turning away customers on December 24 if they haven’t booked their chicken in advance.

“Over the period from 23rd to 25th December, sales can be as high as ten times normal levels,” said Sumeo Yokokawa, of the public relations department at Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan.

The Kentucky Christmas habit started in 1974, after a foreign customer mentioned to a store manager that he had come to buy fried chicken because he was unable to find turkey in Japan. His words inspired a sales campaign that paid off.

“The fashion at the time was to have a nice American-style Christmas,” said Yokokawa. “So we offered the chicken as a set with a bottle of wine and it was very popular.”
[...]
In Japan, many families opt for a plain sponge cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries. As delicious as it sounds, the term “Christmas cake” was long used to refer to unmarried women over the age of 25, who were said to be past their best, like cakes after December 25.

All of this is actually totally true. Not just KFC, but also Lotteria (crappy McDonald’s knockoff, apparently soon to be replaced by its parent company with a Burger King franchise) offer Christmas promotions on fried chicken, as do supermarkets, and even the small but excellent fried chicken takeaway I found in the Demachi area shoutengai this past Sunday. I would also like to congratulate the reporter for indicating that the totally old fashioned and no longer used “Christmas cake” expression for unmarried women is in fact no longer used. I’ve seen Western media touting that expression as recently as a year or two ago, and it’s nice to see that news of its demise is filtering abroad.