TOKYOMANGO

Beef bowl price wars signal deflation

The New York Times has an interesting article that points to the price of beef bowls (gyudon) as a sign of deflation. Sukiya, Yoshinoya, and Matsuya have all been slashing prices, it says, and that's not a good thing:

The battle has also come to epitomize a destructive pattern repeated across Japan’s economy. By cutting prices hastily and aggressively to attract consumers, critics say, restaurants decimate profits, squeeze workers’ pay and drive the weak out of business — a deflationary cycle that threatens the nation’s economy.

Eating a beef bowl for lunch or a late-night snack in Japan is the equivalent of going to Burger King, but much tastier, in my opinion.

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Yasuko Namba, once the oldest woman to climb Everest

While I was in Nepal, I read an incredible book by climber/journalist Jon Krakauer called Into Thin Air. It chronicles the events of an infamous Everest expedition in 1996 that left half a dozen people dead shortly after reaching the summit. Super sad, super amazing adventure story. One of the climbers who died was a 47-year old petite Japanese woman named Yasuko Namba. She was a graduate of Waseda University and worked on the business side of FedEx in Japan, but her real passion was climbing. That spring, she left her husband behind and took off to climb Everest on the same expedition with Krakauer, led by a famous guide who also died on the mountain.

Did you know that the first two women in the world to successfully climb the Seven Summits were both Japanese? The first was Junko Tabei, who climbed Everest with an all-female expedition sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun and Nihon Television. She passed out unconscious for several minutes before arriving at the top of Everest in 1975. Tabei is still alive today; she doesn't climb as much as she used to, but she's the head of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan.

Namba was the second woman to complete this feat, but she didn't make it back alive. In fact, she died lost and alone in a freezing cold blizzard. Her death is written about in a lot of detail in Into Thin Air. She obviously had an amazing spirit and an incredible amount of guts. I'm sure everyone who ascends Everest does so knowing that they may not make it down alive. Still, I finished the book wishing someone had made a better effort to save her.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Tokyo Vice, a book about an American journalist on the yakuza hit list

I just finished reading Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. It's a new book written by a guy named Jake Adelstein. If you haven't seen his byline, it's probably because he spent over a decade as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun — the Japanese version, that is. The book kicks off with funny stories of how Adelstein came to Japan to study Buddhism but ended up studying his ass off to pass the Japanese language reporter exam. Miraculously, he gets accepted and is thrown into detective-like work on the police and crime beats in the Tokyo area. Through anecdotes of his own mishaps as the only foreigner among all his Japanese colleagues and sources, we get some fun insights on Japanese culture. But the book also takes us deep into the world of Japanese crime beat reporting, illuminating the relationships among the police force and the yakuza and the media. It's interesting — you hear bits and pieces of this stuff on the news and in academic papers, but it's much more fun to read a first person account of someone who was really there. Towards the end, the book takes on a much scarier tone as Adelstein gets wrapped up in some serious yakuza conspiracies — I won't go into detail here, but the threats that Adelstein faces are real and present, and he doesn't sleep well at night.

I actually had the pleasure of meeting Adelstein yesterday; we and Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times hung out over Peking Duck and drinks in Roppongi. He is as fun and crazy as he appears to be in the book, which is a good thing. I should also mention that the writing is superb — I start reading a lot of books about Japan written by non-Japanese people, but rarely do I finish them out of anything other than a sense of obligation. This one, though, had me hooked to the end.

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein = 5/5

Momotarou restaurant in Pokhara

There are quite a few Japanese restaurants and establishments in Pokhara. Momotarou restaurant is one of them. Have any of you ever been there?

How Zoff is taking over the eyeglasses market

Last time I was in Tokyo, I spent a couple hundred bucks on a really nice pair of glasses at a boutique shop in Harajuku. A few months later, my puppy Malcolm chewed them to bits — to be exact, he cracked one of the lenses and gnawed on the earhooks. So when I came back to Tokyo this time, I went back to the store to see if they could either fix them or order me another pair. But the store was gone. "That store went out of business," a neighborhood cop told me. "They couldn't compete, the rent was too high and they weren't making enough money."

You know what I think happened? Zoff happened. I'm not sure exactly when the first Zoff glasses store was launched, but on my last few trips back I have noticed that they are now everywhere. There is one each Ebisu station, Meguro station, Shibuya station, and Harajuku station. Basically, Zoff brings the fast food model to eyeglasses. They have a very basic recipe — two or three lens shapes that fit into a variety of frames that they claim are custom-made to look good on a Japanese person's face. They guarantee new glasses to be made for 5000 yen ($50) within half an hour. The process of purchasing glasses is basic assembly line style: pick a frame, get your eyes checked, make a payment, find out availability, wait 30 minutes. It's so cheap and fast that you could even just get one made for the day if you forget to bring yours to work. After browsing several glasses stores near my house, I too was sucked into a pair at Zoff because of how cheap and easy it was &mdash and also because the cheap plastic purple frame was kind of cute.