And Sometimes Why

This being Halloween, I thought I’d share with you a video of the setup for my school’s annual Halloween party. You can see the size of the hall we use and get an idea of how we entertain 100 of our students for two and a half hours.

This is a photo of the instructions posted on the inside of a sliding restroom stall door in the Takamatsu airport.

Believe it or not, the (not-pictured Step 2 of the) instructions were actually useful because the lock was like some sort of logic puzzle where you have to figure out the exact direction and angle at which two pieces of metal engage and disengage.

While conceptually a good idea to save space in those tiny airport restrooms (when was the last time you saw a stall as big as the one in the diagram?), this door proved more novelty than useful.

This pair of courtesy phones (look closely for the other cord hanging down on the other side of the glass) is at the Takamatsu airport, on the glass wall separating the pre-security check-in area and the post-security boarding gate area.

It’s basically a prison phone so you can talk to people on the other side without having to deal with going out of and back into the secure area.

Neat idea, eh?

I took this photo at an airport Pizza Hut in Guam that is frequented by throngs of Japanese tourists.

The names of the coins are on the left, and the values are printed on the right.

Here is the 海苔 – のり – nori (shredded and formed seaweed) shelf in a local supermarket.

In this photo alone, you can see over a dozen varieties, and you can tell the shelf is in need of restocking.

Japanese people eat a lot of seaweed, let me tell you.

I can also tell you the names of the kinds I don’t like, and ways to prepare it that taste like slimy, salty rubber.

“Las Vegas Spareribs” flavored Pringles!

All the time I spent growing up there and I didn’t know Las Vegas was famous for spareribs.

Can anyone enlighten me?

I took this stealth photo with my phone in a smoky arcade & pachinko parlor here in Matsuyama.

There wasn’t anyone else around, so the baby was definitely with the two gentlemen playing pachinko. I’m not sure which of them was supposedly taking care of him(?), but for the kid’s sake I hope he doesn’t do so regularly.

Like Las Vegas, Japan has an unpublicized population whose gambling addiction sometimes leads to familial neglect.

I found this bag of cat food in the pet goods aisle of a hardware store.

It’s Tuna-flavored Cat Smack!

まぐろ味のキャットスマックだ！

This industrial power switch resides backstage at Hakuho Hall (白鳳会館), an office building with a large rental stage hall near Miki Study Pals, in which we rent a room for overflow classes and hold our twice-yearly holiday parties.

The interesting part is that the big red button is ON, and the big green button is OFF.

And so I ask Why, Japan, Why??