...but if you're an old lady, Japan's ever-innovative entrepreneurs will welcome your silver yen with open arms.

This is an actual picture of Tokyo, taken from the viewing platform in the Tochō (Tokyo City Hall), and not a computer-generated graphic.

Somewhere in the midde of that lot is Penguin Heights... In Tokyo's defence though, I have to say that while it's not the world's greenest city, down on the ground it's quite a lot more pleasant, albeit an aesthetic free-for-all.

I made a bit of a faux-pas at work yesterday.

You see, I put the C-word on a public-facing part of the company website.

Of course I blamed the marketing people - that is what we in IT traditionally do - but they did put me up to it. Being a well-travelled, worldly type I didn't think much of it at the time, but this morning I woke up to an urgent message from the US branch telling me to make it as if the C-word had never been there in the first place, preferably by yesterday.

You see, apparently in the States the C-word is a bit of a no-no. People might get upset by it. So as not to offend the sensitivities of North American readers, I shall discretely place the C-word below the fold. (If you are upset by offensive language, you might want to stop reading now and read this much nicer article about ponies and butterflies which doesn't contain the C-word at all).

OK, here it is:

My apologies if I was a little curt and abrupt to you earlier this evening.

You see, I dropped by your Japanese fast food chain store place in search of a nice hot nourishing dish of dead cow on rice, as I have done many times before, and was about to tuck in to the bowl the young dude on duty had just placed in front of me when you very confusingly asked "スプーンをさしてあげましょうか？"^[*] and making a gesture moving both hands horizontally sideways indicating, as far as I can tell, that you were trying to tell me something about a short plank of wood.

Did it look like I was about to tuck into a plate of curry?

Nope. Possibly you observed me poking at the deceased bovine bits on top of the rice with my chopsticks in a slightly disjointed manner? Well that was a) because I was f*cking whacked after 11 hours in front of a computer, meaning my hand-eye coordination was not at its best; and b) experience shows that if I don't do a little preparatory work on your signature dish I get a tangled sinewy mess which is somewhat hard to ingest.

If I wanted a f*cking spoon I would f*cking ask you for one.

And anyway, if you were assuming I was a just-off-the-boat gaijin unfamiliar with the strange wooden implements the civilised locals use to consume nourishment, how the fugu do you think I managed to order the darn item in the first place, seeing as the buttons on your ordering machine^[**] are in Japanese only and all that? And how the hell would you expect me to understand something like "さしてあげましょうか" (a colloquial semi-formal construction probably not found in volume 1 of "Japanese for Foreigners Just Off the Boat") in the context of a short plank of wood?

Oh yes, I hope you counted the number of grains of rice left after I finished the apparently challenging task of consuming a meal using only two round sticks. I believe there was one which somehow attached itself to the side of the bowl.

^[*] "Would you like a spoon with that, sir?"
^[**] a labour-saving device which has the additional advantage that the people handling the food don't have to handle money as well

Yes, those are my knees. And yes, this photo was taken today. One of those days where I check my work email at 7:30am and before I know it it's midday and I am still in the clothes I woke up in. And out of the wind it was pleasantly warm on the balcony, which was compensation for missing my daily commute on the Yamanote Line, especially as apparently the heating in the office wasn't working properly.

(Occasionally I might write the odd factual article which may be of actual practical interest to someone living in Tokyo or Japan. This is one of them.)

The Cocoon Tower, yesterday

Keen students of architecture, and observational types who regularly check out Shinjuku's skyline, will have noticed that the Cocoon Tower - last reported on in these pages in February - has been completed and is now incubating the next generation of Mothra, who will no doubt one day come forth and start flapping around the spotlights illuminating Tokyo Tower until someone can find a swatter big enough. I digress. The tower's full name is Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower (モード学園コクーンタワー), and as a deeply unfashionable person (it contains some sort of design/fashion school) it has been of little immediate interest to me, until I noticed signs announcing the opening of the latest branch of "Book 1st", which is a fairly widespread chain of bookstores (and not e.g. some sort of booking agency, as the name might imply) in the Kansai area and around Tokyo.

As my book budget probably exceeds my fashion budget (and by fashion I mean "clothes bought at Uniqlo") and it seems to be quite a big bookstore, I thought I would toddle along the other day and check it out, with a special eye for the foreign section (me being a foreigner and all that).

Well, it is a big-ish bookstore, occupying the two basement stories of the tower. However - and take this from someone with an unusually keen sense of direction - it is very confusingly laid out. There is no internal connection between floors, and even between sections on the same floor you sometimes have to go "outside" and come back in again. It's as if, after completing the tower, the building owners realised they had all these odd-shaped spaces in the basement, and were desperate to come up with some way of using them.

If it's Japanese books which pique your interest, the selection is pretty good, but while there's a fair selection of foreign (= mainly US American) magazines, the foreign book section is quite small and uninspiring. It did seem to have a big selection of children's books though. The main advantage it has is that - on a Sunday at least - it is nice and quiet (as is the whole skyscraper district west of Shinjuku Station) and has that pleasant new bookshop smell.

Conclusion: if it's foreign books you're after, either of the Kinokuniya stores in Shinjuku, or even Tower Records in Shibuya, offer a better selection.

Opening Hours: daily 10am - 10pm
Telephone: (03) 5339-7611
Directions: From Shinjuku Station's western exit, take the pedestrian tunnel on the north side of Chuo-dori (it's the one with the walkway on the left). Cocoon Tower should be pretty well signposted. At some point on your right you'll see the Book 1st sign. Alternatively take the above-ground route to the easy-to-locate tower, then find a stairway which leads downwards and with some luck it should deposit you in front of the bookstore and not in the underground carpark.

Apparently there are still people out there who question why Japanese girls appear so keen on non-Japanese men. In case you still have any doubts, check out this video (SFW outside of sexually repressed Anglo-Saxon corporate environments):

• Levelling the lingerie playing field: bras for men

(If, after viewing this, you feel a tingling desire to know more, you can find more information including online ordering options here, but feel free not to tell me about it, because I really don't want to know).

Update: the "original" video that seems to be spreading virally through the tubes is here (complete with warning for sexually repressed that they might see some actual bare skin). Yes, I do have some slight modicum of taste and no I will not be embedding it.