I’ve never seen this, but apparently there is a very popular show anime show in Japan called “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” whose closing credit sequence has the characters dancing. Somehow it created a mania where people around the world are mimicking the dance in costumes.

In this one, Darth Vader comes in at about the third of the way in. This one is in London. In this one, a girl (probably British) travels all over Japan dancing. In this one, a bunch of Japanese kids dance on the street; towards the end, cops appear and they all scatter quickly. I posted the original ending credit sequence below:

Akihabara is a section in Tokyo where they sell almost nothing but electronics. It is a popular destination for tourists. In this video, they asked 100 tourists what they bought, and presented the top 5 items. The voice overdub is pretty funny. The no. 1 item is unexpected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVk_3eqbdqI

There is no accounting for taste, but it’s pretty clear when someone has a very different or a very similar taste from you. And this difference or similarity stays relatively consistent and predictable. So, I wanted to measure the degrees of differences and similarities. This is something I started back in 2001. I originally created it as a stand-alone application but now I put it on the web so anyone can use it to measure their differences to others, or to a specific person they know (assuming that both take the same survey.). The structure of these surveys are pretty similar to AllLookSame. Once you take a survey, it will tell you how similar or different you are from everyone else who took the survey. If you ask your friends to take the same survey, you would be able to compare yourself one-to-one with them. If you are interested, try it out at TasteMetrics.com.

This article (all in Japanese) asked 665 people in their 30s if switching their jobs is advantageous in their careers or not. In the US, especially in the big cities, if you stay too long at one company, you are often viewed as “dead wood”; so, answer to this question is quite obvious. But in Japan, it’s not so obvious.

My father’s generation in Japan had never considered switching their jobs. Everyone worked for one company all of their lives. If they did switch, their fate at the new company was quite grim. They were labeled as outsiders and treated as such forever. Their chances of climbing up to the management was slim.

In this article, the anxiety of switching jobs is still clear even for the current generation of 30-somethings. More than half of the people interviewed said that they expected their salaries to go down or remain the same. This is certainly strange from the American point of view. Many American companies avoid hiring at lower salaries since they won’t be as motivated and excited as the people hired at higher salaries. The reason for switching jobs in Japan is obviously not about money. In many cases, it’s probably an unbearable feeling of discontent and unhappiness. In other words, the word “ten shoku”, which simply means switching jobs, has the implications that are equivalent to changing one’s career entirely, like a lawyer quiting his job to work as a cook in a restaurant. This is one of many reasons why the Japanese expats living in the US feel Japan is “suffocating”.

I found some interesting Japanese cell phone designs. Here is one from NEC. It says it’s the world’s thinnest cell phone. This one by Kyocera is a water-proof cell phone. I like the design of this Panasonic one. The somewhat retro look of this one, I also like. Interesting use of color on this one.

Apparently salt ice cream is quite popular in Japan. I have no idea what it tastes like. I will have to search for it here in New York. Frozen goods are easy to import, so I’m sure I’ll be able to find it somewhere. I’ll report back again when I find it.

This is a very popular dish known in Japan as “hamburg”. This has puzzled me for quite some time. What is the relationship between what is known in Japan as “hamburg” and what is known in the US as “hamburger”? It would make sense that hamburg (without the buns) would come before hamburger in history, but according to this article on Wikipedia, it does not appear that such a thing as “hamburg” existed in Hamburg, Germany, nor in the US. Oddly, the article mentions Hamburg, New York, as the origin of the name. This does not make sense. If the origin is Hamburg, New York, why would the Japanese have this dish called “hamburg” which is essentially hamburger but without the buns? What would make more sense is that hamburg did exist in Germany before hamburger was invented in the US. All that the Americans did was to put hamburg on the buns, but the Japanese “hamburg” must have originated from the same source as the American hamburger. It could not have been invented by flattening meatballs as one of the theories imply, nor from substituting beef for pork in a sausage patty as another theory implies. Hamburg without the buns had to exist before hamburger was invented; otherwise the Japanese would not have this thing called “hamburg”.

On the Japanese Wikipedia, the origin of hamburg is described as the grilled steak tartare that was popular among the working class people in Hamburg, Germany. Well, if you grill a steak tartare, technically it’s not “tartare”, but I assume that the working class people were eating the leftover steak tartares; and since they were too old to eat raw, they grilled them to be safe. “Hamburg” was then exported to various other cultures, and in the US, someone thought of putting it between the buns. Now, this theory makes a lot more sense.