Author: Joe Jones

Joe’s thoughts after 24 hours in Seoul

I just got back last night from a brief quasi-business trip to Seoul. The most memorable part was getting off the plane, turning on my phone and seeing an e-mail from Adam which read, in full:

Subject: Abe resigning!
Body: YES screw that guy

That’s way better coverage than any Japanese news site, in my opinion.

Anyway, after wandering around Seoul for a day or so like a typical bemused tourist (this was my first time in Korea), here are some conclusions I have reached:

Six things that are better in Korea

  1. Street food. Festivals in Japan are good for this sort of thing, I guess, but don’t come anywhere close to Jongno at night.
  2. Toothbrushes. Japanese toothbrushes have a tiny head that might belong on an electric toothbrush but makes manual toothbrushing twice as laborious. Korea has nice, big, industrial-strength toothbrushes that don’t mess around.
  3. Mobile phone reception. My phone never lost a bar on the subway ride from the airport to downtown. Words cannot express the frustration I have when I’m riding the Tokyo metro, see an interesting item in my Gmail inbox, hear the train doors closing, frantically click to try to load the message before the train goes off into the tunnel, and end up staring at the screen for the next two minutes wondering why the train is suddenly going so damn slow.
  4. StarCraft and Counterstrike on television. Korean cable is awesome even if I can’t understand most of it.
  5. Chopsticks. Those stainless-steel Korean restaurant chopsticks are practically lethal weapons, and I get the feeling that with enough Korean chopstick training I could kill a man with my bare hands. I imagine this is part of the point, actually.
  6. Women. If we’re to use a hotness scale here, Korea has both a higher mean and a narrower standard deviation. Or, in layman’s terms, there are more hotties and the hotness is more consistent. Not to disparage Japanese women, of course—beauty is more than skin-deep, but, well, the skin is where it shows first.

Six things that are better in Japan

  1. Cleanliness. Granted, this is better in Japan than anywhere else in the world (except maybe Singapore), and Seoul is certainly not as bad as Shanghai, but Seoul still has the grubbiness of a major American or European city about it, and the air quality could use some work.
  2. Convenience stores. Korean convenience stores come close in many respects, but they’re missing something. Was it bentos? Maybe softcore porn?
  3. Manners. This is another area where Korea seems to be in a zone smack between Japan and China. In Japan, nobody bothers anybody most of the time. In China, everybody bothers everybody all the time. In Korea, shopkeepers are often pushy and homeless people occasionally rattle their coin mug in your face, but for someone used to the Japanese way of doing things, that seems like a lot. (Which just goes to show how Japan can spoil someone.)
  4. Walking. Seoul is walkable here and there, but much more spread out than Tokyo, and in the north-central area, being unable to cross the street seems more like the norm than the exception.
  5. Money. The new won notes look just like euros. The yen at least looks unique. Even if the phoenix on the back of the 10,000 yen note looks rather nightmarish, you at least have the comfort of Fukuzawa Yukichi staring down your trading partner as if thinking “I am not amused.”
  6. Trains. If you compare a map of the Seoul subway system to a map of the Tokyo subway system, the two look like equals, but that ignores the fact that (a) Tokyo’s subway lines cover a much smaller geographic area, so the stations are far more densely crammed in together, and (b) Tokyo also has scores of train lines that aren’t subways, while Seoul doesn’t have much more than the lines on the subway map. I really wanted more excuses to ride the subway around, but it always ended up being much easier to walk or hail a cab.

Anyway, those are my completely uneducated opinions at first immersion. A public “thank you” to Brendon Carr of Korea Law Blog for showing me where to get good curry, and to United Airlines for making intra-Asia mileage award tickets so darn cheap. I’ll be back one of these days…

Attempting to explain just what it is about Louis Vuitton and Japan

One of my favorite blogs at the moment is Marginal Revolution, which is run by a couple of academic economists who basically try to squeeze their science into every facet of life (á la Freakonomics).

A recent post is totally on point with what we talk about here at MFT: namely, Japan’s statistically insane obsession with luxury goods. What’s great about this post is not the post itself, but the wide variety of comments it generated from armchair analysts who all think they know why Japan loves expensive stuff so much.

Some of my favorite theories:

  • “Being in a warring society since 12th centuries until before their Meiji restoration, the craftsmanship and other manufacturing skills were cultivated by warlords in order to empower their army.”
  • “It might be a substitute for not being able to purchase land.”
  • “The Japanese fascination with brand names is an East Asian cultural thing. Having cool things gives one more “face” in society so they like to have things they can show off.”

I figure it might be that since people are living and moving around so closely together, they have more incentive to accessorize themselves since they’ll be coming into contact with so many people during the day. Of course, it could also be a happy mixture of all these theories with some sort of plus alpha on top. Any ideas?

Gaijin cards for illegal immigrants?

I was looking up some statistics on the Ministry of Justice website tonight and, just for kicks, decided to take a look at their “How to Interpret a Gaijin Card” poster. I noticed this rather odd item on page two: it’s possible to get a gaijin card even if you don’t have a status of residence. Odd, because the only way to get to Japan without a status of residence is to hide on a boat or an airplane.

The MOJ’s explanation (in the fine print to the right) is that foreigners have to register even if they have no status of residence. Of course, foreigners have to have a status of residence just to be in Japan (even if it is as a “temporary visitor” on a visa waiver).

So I’m puzzled: why bother issuing gaijin cards to people who shouldn’t be in the country in the first place?

My love-hate relationship with the Northeast

Roy is back home in New Jersey for the time being, while I’m in Philadelphia whiling away the last month and a half before the bar exam. I’m looking forward to heading back to Tokyo in August, but one thing is for sure–there will be a few things I miss about this part of America. Certainly not the food or the security. But the architecture alone will be something of a loss:

Looking up Broad Street

30th Street from across the river

It’s definitely a trade-off: majestic moments for steady fascination. Ah well, this is why God invented frequent flyer miles.

Why horizontal strokes are thinner than vertical strokes

Beer communicationIf you look at Sino-Japanese text printed in the Chinese Song or Japanese Mincho typeface (similar to serif typefaces in European languages), you’ll notice that the horizontal strokes in characters are much thinner than the vertical strokes. Here’s why:

The printing press appeared in China during the Song Dynasty. At the time, each print block contained two portrait-oriented pages placed side by side. The print blocks were all cut from rectangular planks such that the wood grain ran horizontally. Because the grain ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve patterns with the grain, like horizontal strokes. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and very easily break. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes. To prevent wear and tear, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened. These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface.

A brief and random tribute to Masaru Inoue, father of the Japanese railways

Masaru Inoue, father of the Japanese railwaysIf you go to the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station, you can see a big statue of this fellow, Masaru Inoue (井上勝).

Inoue was one of five Choshu samurai sentsmuggled to England in the mid-1860s to figure out how to modernize Japan. He studied railway technology at the University College London, and following his return to Japan served as head of the Japanese national railway program, in some form or another, from 1869 to 1893. During this time he supervised the building of Japan’s first railway line from Tokyo to Yokohama (the first Tokyo station has been reconstructed and can now be seen in Shiodome), and the eventual completion of the Tokaido Main Line between Tokyo and Kobe in 1889.

In his later years he was made a Viscount and served in the House of Peers (sort of the old Japanese equivalent of Britain’s House of Lords). He is also the last “i” in the Koiwai food company, which he co-founded in 1891.

So next time you pass through Tokyo Station, tip your hat to a fellow who helped pave the way for the most awesome railway system in the world. (Or, if you don’t have a hat, do what I do and just take pictures.)

The straight dope on getting a Japanese credit card

I was interested in this topic, but Googling it just led to a bunch of conflicting anecdotes, some from foreigners who couldn’t get credit and others from foreigners who could get lots of credit. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it in Japanese:

To get a credit card, one must first undergo a review by the card issuer. The standards for the review vary by card type and issuer, but essentially, the review is conducted based on the applicant’s “attributes” (occupation, income and credit history).

Generally, because it is mandatory for the applicant or their spouse to have confirmed regular income, it is difficult for unemployed people (excluding students and pensioners) to pass the review. On the other hand, in many cases, a person with real estate, investment, inheritance or gift income who is doing business with a financial institution, even if they are unemployed, can receive a card from an issuer within that insitution’s keiretsu.

In the past, “freeters” and dispatched employees (other than dependents) would not pass the employment and income review of many issuers because they were viewed as having uncertain employment, but due to the changes in working patters in recent years, this is currently less stringent than it was before.

Moreover, in cases of past lateness in credit card payments or periods of nonpayment due to debt restucturing (whether voluntary or through legal restructuring such as bankruptcy), a new credit card cannot generally be issued for the following five or ten years as a penalty, although this varies from case to case. This information is stored at a credit information institution in which the various card issuers participate, so if a person were to apply for a new card from another issuer, in many cases, they would be denied credit during that period. However, because the reviewer is given discretion (there are no laws or regulations on point), there are rare cases where a card is issued. Also, even credit cards which have been regularly paid may be stopped by the card issuer, but the handling of this varies among issuers.

Now, the anecdotes from foreigners in Japan suggest that:

  1. “Dedicated” credit card companies, like American Express and Saison, will issue a card to anyone, while issuers tied to banks, like Sumitomo Mitsui, are much more difficult to deal with (in part because their cards are much sexier).
  2. There are some foreigners who get credit cards on the day they land in Japan; there are others who live in Japan for years and can never pass a single credit review. Oddly enough, when they talk about this on the internet, they never speculate as to why this might be the case. (Maybe it’s because a NOVA salary barely pays the rent?)
  3. Being a permanent resident helps a lot.
  4. Being a lifetime employee (as opposed to working on a fixed-term contract) REALLY helps a lot.
  5. It is completely unnatural for a country to be this stingy about consumer credit. (Especially considering that in the US, a Doberman/newborn baby/ice sculpture can get a credit card in the mail without even applying for it.)

Personally, I’m amused and appalled that reputable American financial institutions have given me something like $10,000 in additional credit lines this year when I’m living off of student loans. But I’d like to know: do any of our loyal readers have experience with the Japanese credit review game?