The photos below are from a single train car and the platform at the station. A lot have to do with the “silver seats”, which are the seats at the end of the train car with orange handles hanging above them instead of white ones. You can guess what these are for based on the photos below. And no, I have never seen anyone switch off their phone near these seats.

Danny Choo recently wrote about subway posters too. Lots of Tokyo Metro’s “Do it at Home” posters can be found on their website.

“Gropers will not be forgiven.”

“Manners: Please turn off your phone near the silver seats.”

“Power OFF!! No phones near the silver seats.”

“Thank you for understanding. Silver Seats.”

“STOP. Don’t rush. Don’t hurry.”

No bikes on trains. (It must be folded up and put into a special bag if you want to bring one on.)

“Let’s protect children together.” The people at the bottom are being very helpful and polite

“Please give thought to preggers girls. If you see this ‘maternity mark’, we ask for your kindness.”

However, when words start becoming more complex, and are neither commonly used words nor easily pronounced for Japanese, it can become a problem. For example, when a chain of cafés called “Excelsior” first appeared, no one knew how to pronounce it. Excelsior could have helped by putting a katakana (phonetic) pronunciation on their signs, but they didn’t and people were going there without knowing the name of the place.

KFC has a pronunciation guide. ケンタッキー (kentakkii) on the right of the sign below is how Japanese people refer to KFC (“Kentucky”).

McDonald’s is an interesting case. Their recent restaurants have signs just like in the US.

But of course, McDonald’s is a household name here now. Even for someone who doesn’t know the roman alphabet, just by the shape and colour of the letters they would be able to read it. However, not every business has the luxury of being a household name, and McDonald’s was once one of those businesses. Check out their older signs.

That is totally in katakana, so is very easily pronounced, and on top of that, it explains what sort of restaurant it is! Just in case you didn’t know what sort of restaurant it is, it says “McDonald’s Hamburgers” (マクドナルドハンバーガー, makudonarudo hanbaagaa).

In my case, this year I received my first ever honmei chocolate! Woo! Last year I received giri chocolate from my private lesson teachers, and I reciprocated with chocolate on White Day; the day exactly one month later (14th March) when men give chocolate back to the women who gave them chocolate on Valentine’s Day.

Check out my honmei chocolate!

If you’re a foreigner you might be greeted with the odd “harro!” (hello), especially from enthusiastic middle-school kids who have just started their English classes. It is no secret that the difference between R and L is negligible in Japanese. For example, in Lost in Translation Bill Murray took a while to understand why a woman sent to his room to entertain him was demanding that he “lip” her stocking. It shouldn’t be a big surprise though: R seems to vary a lot in difference regions. French Rs, Spanish Rs, Italian Rs, English Rs… even within English it varies—in Ireland we call it “or” and pronounce it just like the Americans do, but in England and the US it’s called “ar” and the English soften it so much it sometimes disappears altogether (put on your best posh English accent and say “our door”). In Japanese, it is simply pronounced similarly to L, and since there is no “L” in Japanese, they just blur together and out drops cacophonies such as “harro!!”.

What I have found particular interesting is how I have trouble learning new non-Japanese words because of this. One brand of ibuprofen tablets here is “Bufferin”, but I was calling it “Buffalin” in my head until I saw it written in English. On TV I saw a documentary about an elephant called “Randy” but I was calling him “Lundy” in my head until an American woman started talking in an interview about him. A ploblem it is, but at least it’s a cute ploblem.

The best approximation in English is “there’s no helping it”, I suppose. But it really is a mindset rather than just a few words. When a big decision is ahead of oneself and a compromise has to be made, rationalising the compromise is important to keep away that horrible old buyer’s remorse. It can be tough to compromise using logic, but “shou ga nai” helps compromise without having to resort to actually really compromising: it’s a shortcut! I don’t want to give away 2 months of rent for (what I perceive as) “nothing”, but—shou ga nai—has to be done.

At the same time, I have been doing my best to still be a good shopper. Though shou ga nai comes up all the time, I managed to get my reikin negotiated down to 1 month, and I transferred a lot of extra money in one go to bring down the bank fees as much as possible, and so on—but it is always there.

Maybe part of this is owing to my mother’s “shopping genes”? Also, on my way to Dublin Airport last month, I ran into my Japanese teacher on the train and one piece of advise that she gave me is to try to hold onto my ability not to take “no” for an answer, that lots of non-Japanese have, but that lots of Japanese lose (in part to “shou ga nai”, surely).

I leave discussion of whether the “shou ga nai” has an effect on how the Japanese deal with natural disasters, crazy low interest rates, and so on, to commenters

口座（こうざ）bank account
交差点（こうさてん）traffic junction
時期に（じきに）soon
順調（じゅんちょう）progressing well/making progress
帖（じょう）counter for tatami mats (and therefore, floor space)
手数料（てすうりょう）fee
手続き（てつづき）process (or step in a process). For example, filling out forms, etc.
床屋（とこや）barber
平米（へいべい）square metre
要は（ようは）in summary

Others that you might not have come across but I heard a lot recently:

契約（けいやく）contract
解約（かいやく）contract cancellation

Copy and paste the lot into WWWJDIC for more information.

I received a letter from my fibre provider, NTT, requesting my payment details. Inside the envelope was a document explaining the process, one form for bank account details, one for credit card details, and a small, addressed, franked envelope to return the forms in.

In Japan the addresses are “backwards”, beginning with the lowest level of detail (country or city) and becoming more detailed as it progresses, ending with the recipient’s name. In this case, it was to NTT. There was a suffix after “NTT”: “行” (yuki). 行 means “to”. Satomi’s mom crossed it out and rewrote it as “御中” (on-chuu).

When sending a letter to a company in Japan, the correct suffix is 御中 (on-chuu) as this is most polite. To an individual, it’s 様 (sama). 行 (yuki), however, is not polite at all, and is complete neutral, meaning simply “to”. When NTT wrote its own address, it would have been embarrassing to use the polite suffix for itself: using an honourific word to refer to oneself is a big no-no in Japanese. However, it is good form to change this to the honourific form when sending it back as you would never write someone else’s address without an honourific if you were writing it yourself.

This is one example of the big differences in Japanese depending on the relationship between the speaker and listener. When I speak with someone older than me, or a stranger, I conjugate my verbs politely, but when I speak with someone younger than me, I conjugate them casually. When I’m a customer, the staff use very formal conjugations and vocabulary with me, even though I am often much younger than them. In business it’s very important to get this right, and in English the words “our company” and “your company” are simple, but in Japanese they come with honourific/humble prefixes: 御社 (on-sha) means “your honourable company” and 弊社 (hei-sha) means “our useless company”.

There’s very little room for error, which is a challenge I look forward to every day.

This is some sort of group of storage container by my new apartment. One of the containers has a green sign on it from Pitatto House (ピタットハウス) looking for a tenant to move in (ご入居受付中). Wouldn’t be so bad if it had windows and electricity I suppose.

Delicious delicious cream stew!

A sign in the underground explaining the “Women Only” carriages. These have been around for ages, and exist to prevent men from groping women in the crowded trains in the mornings.

Recycling outside an apartment block. On this particular night, the boxes for PET, glass and aluminium were out. Everyone in the apartments separates their rubbish into the appropriate boxes and the following morning, they are collected. Every day is a different type of rubbish, and there are lots of types. On top of the 3 above, there are also burnable, non-burnable, dangerous, and plastic types: which all have to be separated and put out on the correct days. Everyone co-operates, though, and it’s a very efficient system. More modern apartment blocks have areas outside where you can put your separated rubbish at any time, rather than having to do it the night before collection.

Shimokitazawa (下北沢) is a shopping area with lots of tiny shops in a labyrinth of tiny streets. One shop (I think it was called Shimokitazawa Garage) is actually a collection of smaller shops, and one of those shops rents individual shelves to individuals to sell their wares, most of which are jewellery. There have been a lot of second-hand clothes shops opened recently, and it’s a big trend here now. Shimokitazawa has quite a lot of them.

Alf is still around here! Yesterday I saw some Alf DVDs in Tsutaya and today this was on TV. Apparently it’s on every Monday night.

Other random news:

• Soba-yasan curry isn’t as nice as regular curry.
• Found a beautiful shrine less than a block away from the apartment I’ll be moving into Feb 20th. I’ll take photos when I’m there at daytime.
• There’s a huge mall and cinema across the road from the apartment, and a big park one block away. Lots of tiny streets around it filled with izakaya and various little restaurants selling sushi, monja-yaki and donburi.
• Blu-ray is cheap here! I’m going to get a 32″ LCD TV for about ¥90,000 which has a Blu-ray recorder in it. BD-RE (re-writable discs) are less than ¥400 each (and are about €8 each in Ireland). The TV is 1080p, chi-deji compatible (explanation in next post), and if you plug in a LAN cable it has a full web browser. Plays DVDs and CDs too.

• When we went in, a man immediately approached us, asked how many of us there were, and led us to our table.
• The male/female ratio was much lower than in Ireland.
• The TV didn’t have soccer, rugby, or hurling, but had skiing on. Close enough I suppose.
• Most importantly, there was no bar. Everything is ordered through the waiters.

Guinness was almost twice the price that it is in Ireland, and my friend tried it and said it tastes a lot more watery (less creamy) than it does in Ireland.

I got a new tshirt in a shop on Takeshita-dori.

Haiji is the Japanese pronunciation of Heidi. Here’s some context: