Odd Stuff in and from Japan

Japan: land of Sushi. Sashimi. Udon. Soba. Miso. Spam Sandwiches. The guilty party is 美味倶楽部 (Beeme Club) in Jingumae 2-19.

A Japanese Spam Sandwich (スパム・サンド, supamu sando) with Spam and Egg, but not Spam, Spam, Spam, and Spam. No Vikings were present.

It's little known in the outside world, but many Japanese cities are suffering from a plague of giant building-eating crabs which have come out of the sea looking for tasty morsels of architecture. It is thought they are Japanese Giant Spider Crabs (for the sticklers amongst you: macrocheira kaempferi) which have mutated due to radioactive leaks from the nuclear power stations located along the Sea of Japan coast. As the crabs are all but impervious to any attempts at restraining them, apart from concentrated artillery fire, many regions have opted to sacrifice one or two less-important structures to placate the giant crustaceans.

Here in Gifu a new approach is being tried, viz. appealing to the crabs' egos. First bait in the form of a fresh building is offered by labelling it "crab food" (かに料理), and once the crab attacks the building it is given the honary title of "Crab Shogun" (かに将軍). This makes the crab believe it is now ruler of the city, and if regular offerings of freshly sacrificed virgin bricks, ferro-concrete panels etc. are made, it can generally be persuaded to refrain from destroying the rest of the city.

Japanese Giant Building-Eating Crab in Gifu

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the tickets that are retained by the ticket gates at stations? Or the seiriken which you drop onto the little conveyor belt along with your bus fare? Well, it turns out they fall into an elaborate system of vacuum tubes which transport them to the factory of Meitetsu Kyōshō (名鉄協商株式会社) where they are transformed into toilet paper.

なごやか　キップ　リサイクル

Link: http://www.meitetsu.co.jp/kyosho/newmenu.htm (Japanese)

Today it was time to clean out the spam bucket, which usually has about the entertainment value as regular cat litter maintainance activities. Buried amongst the many male performance tuning packs etc. was however what appeared from the characters to be a Korean spam, but it also contained a lot of ASCII text which on cursory examination appears to be in Japanese with multiple references to pink pigs.

(There now follows a dissection of this mail which is probably only of interest to afficionados of the Japanese language, and also pictures of a pink pig).

And hangs out at the entrance to Yoyogi Park in Harajuku on Sundays.

Continuing the lavatorial theme: an innocuous, if somewhat dilapidated building in the centre of Tokyo.