Archive for January, 2010

Tiny Italian restaurant revisited

Does anyone remember the tiny Italian restaurant near Kyodo station in Tokyo that was mentioned in a February 2009 post here on Japan Probe? If you’ve forgotten about it, here’s a news segment that aired the other day on ATV, which has their Japanese-speaking foreign travel reporters expressing amazement at the small size of the restaurant:

To read an English language review of the restaurant, check out this post by Claytonian on the Jib TV blog.
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Introducing Sado

As you may recall, Niigata recently invited Japan Probe to send out a blogger to explore the prefecture, and I was the dude that got the job. This video covers many of the things that I saw during my two days on Sado island, which lies in the Sea of Japan. Highlights include spooky robots, angry sea, and my horrible Japanese.

In the video I promised a link to Mr. Jenkin’s book, as he lives on the island, so here is said link (also available on Amazon.jp). I don’t know if it is still up, but at the Nikko Hotel in Niigata city there was an exhibition about the kidnapping issue and Jenkin’s Japanese wife.

Also, bonus question to the probers out there: what is the name of the semi-famous bridge I visit? I can’t for the life of me remember, but someone among or genius-laden readership will know, no doubt.

But the video is just to give you a taste. For information, including Google maps to the exact locations I visited, you’ll have to visit these posts. This video covers day 3 and 4 of my Niigata journey.

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. Sometimes he gets to do cool stuff like this trip.
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Why is Japan so….

Google’s auto-complete feature attempts to find the question users want to ask about Japan:

Check out this post at Tokyo Shift for a comparison to the results for China, America, and Canada.

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Angry passenger tries to kick taxi driver

A drunk guy gets into a taxi, becomes enraged when he mistakenly believes the taxi driver was rude to him, and proceeds to deliver mighty kicks in the direction of the driver:

The best part? Despite the fact that he was angrily demanding compensation from the driver, when the ride was over, the passenger paid the fare.

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First snowfall of the winter in Tokyo

It snowed for a bit in Tokyo earlier this week. Apparently it was the first snowfall of this winter, and was significantly later than last year’s first snowfall:

Unfortunately, it wasn’t much to look at, so the news report aired footage of snow in other places instead. Fukuoka got some snow, and the Sea of Japan side of the country is still getting huge amounts of snow.

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Follow the rules when feeding deer in Nara Park

Just a reminder to all of you out there who are thinking of visiting Nara sometime soon: don’t feed human food to the deer. The deer who live in Nara Park are meant to eat the specially-produced deer crackers sold at the park, yet some jerks think the deer should enjoy other kinds of food. This makes the deer associate plastic bags with food, so they eat such plastic and become sick. The video report below from TBS shows how plastic was found in the stomach of a deer that recently died at the park:

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