The eye of the storm is filled with manga

A typhoon rages outside. To be honest, I'm hoping it picks up a bit. My hosts are acting like it's a really big deal, and maybe it is since apparently trains stop if it gets bad enough (potentially stranding a lot of salarymen), but frankly it just feels like moderately heavy rain and some pretty strong gusts of wind to me. I've experienced worse in spite of never having been in a typhoon before. At any rate, I'm passing it in the same Manga Kissa as last time.

This entry will be contain the miscellaneous observations I didn't have time for last night.

Kitten asked me about Japanese adverts, since she says you can learn a lot about a culture from its advertisement styles. The first thing that springs to mind is that the Japanese who write adverts, even politicians, can say high-flying poetic things like "I will protect the future of the Earth!" and use strong emotive words like "heart", "soul" and "hope" without a trace of irony or self-consciousness. They really do sound like shonen anime characters. If one of our politicians sent out an election poster like this, he would be laughed down, while a TV advert would get a lot of raised eyebrows. It seems the wry cynicism favoured by British and American media is not in fashion here.

The other thing I noticed was, again, a little stereotypical. The adverts are very visual, with a variety of speech bubbles, font and colour changes and clipart. Walls of text are rare, even in train adverts which one stares at for a while. This makes them considerably more impactful and easier to read, if sometimes giving the impression that they're aimed at kids with ADHD (or perhaps create them).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a city perpertually menaced by Godzilla and company, Tokyo is keenly aware of potential cataclysms (though the real threat is more in the direction of earthquakes, which are rarely high-magnitude but devastating when they are). Among the maps dotted around the city are plenty of detailed evacuation maps; posters and adverts remind people that "more dangerous than the earthquake is confidence that the earthquake won't come" (in Japanese, this is a neat pun on jishin "earthquake" and jishin "confidence"); Tokyu Hands, the DIY superstore from yesterday, has a floor dedicated to disaster prevention/management supplies.

Uniqlo, the Japanese clothes store with many branches in the UK, spells the title with katakana in the UK - but with romaji (English letters) in Japan. I guess someone wants to have their cake and eat it when it comes to being foreign and exotic.

Whereas in America, and to an extent the UK, T-shirts with snarky comments, including ones which implicitly or explicitly insult the reader, are fairly popular, the English-language T-shirts here often have positive messages. My favourite so far is a random Japanese young man bearing the slogan "where there's life there's hope" - though, unfortunately, when I see that particular line, my mind launches into a song from the Buffy musical episode (which starts off with a list of positive thinking statements, including that one, and turns into a tirade on their worthlessness).

My first piece of Engrish photography. Getting hold of these is harder than you'd expect, partly since most Japanese English mistakes are lame rather than funny, and partly since taking photos of things people are wearing (the best source of Engrish) or photos of signs in toilets (the second best source I've found so far) is socially frowned upon.

Gaah, out of time again. Curse you, two hours spent writing an e-mail of Bleach (anime) theories to Kitten.