My Favorite Things #1

I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite things from here in Japan:

New drivers get a big 'spring leaf' sticker to put on their car that's yellow and green; old drivers (over 70) get a orange and yellow 'fall leaf' one. (There sure are a lot of fall leaf stickers around here...)

All the students here have these vinyl sports bags that are just ridiculous - big and shiny and...vinyl.

The cars here are just tiny tiny tiny. And cubic. There's actually a vehicle called the 'Cube', though I'm not sure what it is. Everything here pretty much clumps into the category of 'car'. Or 'small moving thing on wheels'. There's also these little white trucks that are especially popular around here, and they remind me of Tinker Toys. I wonder how they'd do on the HotWheels market.

The public phones are bright neon green. I think Matrix 4 should be made in Japan.

There's an AstroBoy on my bankbook. (Everything's cartoonish here.)

I'm convinced any one of these old Japanese people could run a marathon. In North America, old people pretty much shut 'er down when they're 65 and retire. Japanese just keep going. When I got here in February there was still over a meter of snow left, and every day they would be out shoveling so it would melt faster. Now they're all planting their rice fields. And I've never seen so many old people ride bicycles before. Scratch the marathon. These folks could do a biathalon.

Umbrellas are 'cool' here.

I saw the longest rubber boots I've ever seen in my life last week. At a good one meter long, they'd be huge on any average person; on a Japanese they would probably swallow their legs. They should just attach a rubber bodysuit and a snorkel to them and they could go scuba diving.

Till next time...