3button.info

Proof of tanuki.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:51:50 +0900

Proof of tanuki.

justamus: A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:58:28 +0900

A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of the upper social classes in feudal Japan.

Often mistakenly referred to as “female samurai”, female warriors have a long history in Japan, beginning long before samurai emerged as a warrior class.

REOWR.

Butt dial.

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:30:00 +0900

Butt dial.

Getting High in Japan [1]

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:47:05 +0900

Before visiting his family in Japan for the first time, a college friend of mine rolled himself a joint to smoke on the way to the airport. “What? It’s not like they can arrest me for being a little high at airport security. By the time I’m in Japan I’ll feel rested and refreshed.” He tucked the spliff into his breast pocket and fell asleep.

The next day—astonishingly—went off without a hitch; the hours of public transportation, security, boarding, pre-departure, and a nine-hour flight flew by. After a quick stop at baggage claim, and a chat at customs he found himself, on a crisp spring day, in Tokyo, Japan, just as the cherry blossoms began to bloom. He also found a rolled marijuana cigarette in his front breast pocket.

New JETs: How to Get the Most Out of Tokyo Orientation

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:34:31 +0900

So you got into the JET Program, overpacked on expensive and unnecessary omiyage (souvenirs) and have flown off to Never-Never Land. Congratulations. Group A is now hundreds of overpacked, jet-lagged, sweaty boots on the ground in Tokyo, making the same mistakes new ALTs and CIRs always make.

Welcome to Japan, fish. Allow me to drop some knowledge on you: if you get to pick your seminar, there is no way for CLAIR to check that you’re actually attending seminars. The seminars are 100% worthless. They are thrown together at the last minute by crafty JETs looking for a free trip to Tokyo, and they are a horrible waste of time. You should not go to them unless they are taking attendance.

Here’s a trick: look out the window of your ridiculous expensive Keio Plaza hotel room. Guess what? You are in Tokyo. Why the hell are you in your hotel room on Tumblr? Why aren’t you out getting schwasted on all-you-can-drink and acting inappropriately in the way only an ignorant first-time-in-Japaner can while you’re still in a relatively consequence-free environment? Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

Now here is a (foreign) man who is enjoying his time in Japan.

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:33:45 +0900

Now here is a (foreign) man who is enjoying his time in Japan.

Most offensive candy bar wrapper ever?

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 03:31:37 +0900

Most offensive candy bar wrapper ever?

You Are Very Handsome (In Japan) [Your Face is Popular in Asia]

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:45:36 +0900

In Japan you are the most handsome man in the room. You are the spicy foreigner from a far-off land. Your worldly knowledge of foreign foods is staggeringly comprehensive. You have a hot accent. Your hair is the color of the opposite of night. Your eyes burn like lit cigarettes on a packed dancefloor.

In Japan you are an international man of mystery. Your smile is full of questions. Your trousers are full of answers. Your circumcision is exotic. You keep a plane ticket to anywhere-but-Japan in your back pocket and a green card on your ring finger. You walk like you’ve slept with American girls.

In Japan women pretend not to stare on the train. Schoolgirls giggle and whisper as you stride by. Husbands move their wives to the other side of the sidewalk. Mothers lock up their daughters.

In Japan you are King Kong on the Tokyo Sky Tree. You are the western vampire in Bon Temps. You are the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box; a chisled green-plastic soldier under all the candy corn. In the club you are like a bull in a vagina shop.

In Japan you are the flavor of the week: American vanilla. Your friendship is free English lessons. You are very good at using chopsticks. You smell like a foreigner. You look like [insert name of currently popular celebrity here].

You are very handsome (in Japan).

Japanese Sex Noises [Wet, Hot Japanese Summer]

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:52:00 +0900

In Seattle I shared a three-bedroom apartment with one very cool girl and one very cool guy I met on Craigslist. As you might expect, it did not take long for us to become intimately familiar with each other’s sex noises. We tried to be courteous about it, but in close living situations sexual overlap is unavoidable. The girl and I shared a wall and unfortunately her headboard was up against that wall. On more than one occasion I contemplated cock-blocking her at a party. The wall was pretty thin. I never followed through; because I’m such a good guy.

Once, while the girl’s mom was visiting, the guy brought a girl home. He introduced her to us in the living room, then led her up the stairs to his room. We were sitting around the coffee table enjoying some ice tea when the chandelier began to shake. “Oh my! I think we’re having an earthquake!” We could barely contain our laughter. There was even one instance where all three of us were entertaining company at the same time and the building nearly collapsed.

I’ve heard most of my good friends having sex. I have heard my parents having sex. In Amsterdam, I heard sex in my student residence about every single night. At Oktoberfest I heard a couple having sex in the outdoor toilets at ten in the morning.

In three yeas of living in Japan, I have not once heard anyone having sex.

As densely populated as Japan is, you would think that there would be some sex noises in the crisp night air, but in my experience this does not seem to be the case. Granted, I live in a two-unit building and the woman upstairs is about ninety. Sex would probably be the end of her, though she is a tough old bird. I’ve stayed the night in other apartments and gone on long walks around residential areas. In my girlfriend’s apartment you could hear the neighbors talking two units away. I’m fairly certain everyone in that building has heard us.

Japanese people are deeply concerned with not inconveniencing others, and I suppose this applies to sex noises. I have always maintained that you can be as loud as you want if you’re having sex, but this value does not appear to be universal. Japanese apartments and houses are not particularly well-insulated against the cold or sound, so if things are getting hot inside it should be pretty apparent from the outside. Some have suggested that perhaps the Japanese just are not having much sex. The country has a low birth rate problem, and couples do not seem particularly affectionate in public.

But what about what goes on behind closed doors? What about the ubiquitous love hotels? Is that where the majority of the country’s sex is happening? Are we really so self-conscious about our sex noises that we must relegate them to cheap, windowless hotel rooms? I cannot accept this.

It’s summertime dammit, and I want to hear some sexing.

Japan Subway Mayonnaise Bukkake Attack

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:59:00 +0900

SAPPORO — Japan Today reported Thursday that Sapporo police are looking for a man suspected of throwing delicious Japanese mayo at some schoolgirls on Monday.

Be on the lookout for a man 25-40 years old, approximately 170cm (5’7”) with short hair and glasses.

Got to love a slow news day. “Well, he could be 25… or 40.” Throwing mayonnaise in a train station. And it gets printed… in English too. Only in Japan.

Pushing the 3button on your toilet seat (the butt button,...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:10:20 +0900

Pushing the 3button on your toilet seat (the butt button, Japan’s most significant technological contribution to the world of bathroom science) is more than an adventurous leap of faith. It is a self-actualizing action: a life-affirming tipping point. The essence of the Japanese conception of ヨロ (YORO, sometimes incorrectly called YOLO the way GOJIRA is mispronounced GODZILLA). It is this spirit, this philosophy of mind and body synergistic, that Horace had in mind when he wrote “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero. trans. Seize the Day, putting as little trust as possible in the future.” While pushing the button may be the first act of realizing, this mantra is not limited to rectal hygiene. There are opportunities to vigorously exercise and expel your YORO onto the world all around you.

It’s Friday, so you are likely gearing up to go out and, perhaps, get into some trouble tonight. You’ll head to the bar, have a few tasty brews, maybe some cheap beers to finish it off, wash it all down with a bad-idea bourbon. Think about talking to that girl across the room then chicken out and stumble home alone like you always do.

But do you know what you could be doing? Anything else. Will you be, like the gloriously skinny, stunningly white boy in the picture above, stripping completely naked and wrapping yourself in sumo-style traditional Japanese underwear (褌 fundoshi)? Will you be running with thousands other through icy cold water in the middle of the night, drunk out of your mind on sake, whiskey, soju and god-knows-what that 70-year-old man insisted that you pound, to crowd into a thousand-year-old temple to push and shove and elbow and fight your way to ropes to climb and slip and fall and break and bruise? This weekend will you find yourself sandwiched and squeezed between so much man-flesh like a bag of gummy bears in the back pocket of some guys skinny jeans on a hot summer day? Cry “YORO!” and let slip the hounds of war. Laughing and crying with every laborious breath; pissing yourself and throwing up at the same time until finally—FINALLY—grasping in your hand the blessed stick that is the object of so many thousands’ manly impetuses.

Do your weekend plans include public semi-nudity, socially-acceptable brawls and excessive public drunkenness? Because they could. YORO.

Photo: On my way by Dust Mason on Flickr.

My students, in perfect English:

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:37:02 +0900

My students, in perfect English:
Student 1: (After taking a picture with her phone.) Travis-sensei, you are so handsome...
Student 2: ...in Japan. Your face is popular in Asia.

Photo

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:40:53 +0900

Wet, Hot Japanese Summer

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:36:29 +0900

In the hot wetness of summer, over the gentle rhythms of frog fucking there is a buzzing in the air. Inside the mosquito coils are smoldering once again, but outside… Outside there is a different kind of fire in the damp air: the rich aroma of burning loins.

Japanese summer smells like come. Man-seed. Jism. Baby gravy. Spunk. Spooge. Man-spackle. (“Cum”, if you must.) Walking or bicycling around outside of the city, you’ll catch whiffs of it on the breeze. It’s as if the entire country is covered in bukkake. Given how moist the air is these days, that’s how I feel when I walk outside anyways. Covered in all kinds of nasty.

They say that the islands of Japan were formed by drops of water off of a god’s sword as he lifted it from the ocean. Well, apparently that’s not all the gods dropped. Something on this island reeks of jiz. For the last ten years this quesiton has haunted me. What is that smell? It was my hatch. My sin. My obsesssion. Light of my life, smell of fiery loins. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.

I never discovered the source in high school. I left the island for the first time bitter and jaded, vowing never to return. But for years the mystery of the manthrax musk continued to haunt me.

But I returned. This island has a way of pulling you back. And now I know the truth.

I have identified the culprit: the Japanese pear tree. The Japanese pear tree smells like a 12 year old boy’s crusty old tube sock. Flowering, it looks quite pleasant; almost like sakura. If cherry blossoms were covered in man butter.

Blood on the Tracks

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:46:56 +0900

JR (Japan Rail) trains are notoriously punctual; most lines are rarely more than one minute late. However, it’s not uncommon for there to be massive delays due to severe weather (like the massive typhoon scheduled to hit Japan tomorrow) and something called “human damage”: suicide delays.

Suicide is a substantial problem in Japan. The country has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, at 23.8 per 10,000 people in 2011 (China and South Korea also have remarkably high suicide rates). This is typically attributed to social pressures to succeed in school and business, culturally relaxed attitudes that sometimes celebrate suicide as a selfless act, as well as the recent economic turmoil.

But of all the ways to kill yourself, why a train? Japan does not allow guns, so the speediest and (seemingly) most reliable method is off the table. But there’s also the anonymity of a rail suicide; nobody you know needs to see the results. Typically, rail suicides occur at smaller stations skipped by express trains. As Special Rapid trains barrel through local stations without stopping, these offer the surest guarantee of fatality. Furthermore, smaller stations often lack the watchful JR personnel of larger hubs.

Due to the high costs of cleanups and delays, families of the victims often get slapped with 1 to 10 million yen (approx. $10,000 - $100,000) cleanup bills. If a secondary goal of killing yourself at a train station is to spare your family the hardship of finding your body at home, this potential financial burden should act as a deturrant. Now, if it was the victim’s family that was largely responsible for pushing them to take their own life, this cleanup bill can act as a final “fuck you” to next-of-kin.

To discourage suicides, JR has installed blue LED lighting on many train platforms. This is supposed to have a calming effect. Though common in subways, very few train stations have installed suicide prevention doors; the cost is simply too great.

I’ve known a couple of people who were on trains that hit someone, and I’ve been caught up in long delays caused by “human damage”, but thankfully I’ve never witnessed anyone take their own life. Occasionally, standing on a platform I’ll see some world-weary salaryman walking along the platform or standing too far over the yellow, studded “danger blocks” as the train comes in and my breath catches in my throat as I wonder if things are about to go horribly wrong. But then he hears the buzzer going off, or an attendant taps him on the shoulder, and I realize that he is in fact just drunk, not suicidal.

If door knob licking is a thing that is happening in Japan now,...

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 22:32:00 +0900

If door knob licking is a thing that is happening in Japan now, I don’t want to live in this country anymore. Hell, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

I recall a similar story back in 2002, when David Beckham was playing in the Japan-Korea World Cup (soccer, football if you’re fancy) some whack-o Japanese girl broke into his hotel room and was caught licking his toilet seat like it was a Tootsie-Roll Tootsie-Pop and a philosopher’s owl had tasked her with a quest to get to the center of that motherfucker.

From that anecdote, these pictures, my (modest) familiarity with Japanese pornography, and the weird train dude in Nagahama who’s always hitting on foreign guys, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s some strange tongue stuff going on in this country.

Come to think of it, the Japanese language almost never requires its speakers to show any tongue. Perhaps that’s why it’s found so erotic here. No hard TH sounds. Say DEATH METH BREATH. REOWR.

Stay classy, Japan.

I Choose You, Dung Beetle

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:50:00 +0900

For the Japanese parent who cannot afford a Nintendo 3DS and the newest cartridge of Pokemon: Bedazzled Black and White 2, there is the exciting world of beetle fighting. The stag and rhinoceros beetles being indigenous invertebrates to Japan, your child can experience a deep connection to his or her proud heritage by embracing the centuries-old traditon of insect bloodsport.

Supplies for raising these big-bad fighting machines can be had in any ¥100 store. Pet stores, discount shops, and your occasional invertebrate vending machine sell these ferocious fighters by the millions for modest prices so that your children can get them all hyped up on sugar, gunpowder, Lipovitamin-D, cocaine WHATEVER IT TAKES to spark that hemolymph-lust and make Jean-Claude Van Dung rage in that cage. Or dirt-mound sumo ring. GO WILD.

In related news, Monster Energy drinks have begun appearing on shelves in convenience stores and supermarkets in Japan. While I cannot condone the use of such beverages by human beings, let alone children, I suspect that it will have a transformative effect on the world of mollusk match-ups.

While we’re on topic, could we also get some Four-Loko and Sparks (original recipes) up here? Do you remember Zima? It still exists here.

My friend Kenji D. Lee made this video of our day planting rice...

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:41:00 +0900

My friend Kenji D. Lee made this video of our day planting rice last weekend in Adogawa, Shiga, Japan. It was, without question, some of the best time I have spent in this lovely country.

めっちゃ (meccha) slang: totally, so, fuckin’ ええ、めっちゃかわいいよ！ OMG! That’s so fuckin’...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:47:22 +0900

めっちゃ (meccha)
slang: totally, so, fuckin’

ええ、めっちゃかわいいよ！
OMG! That’s so fuckin’ cute!

めっちゃ原減った。
I’m so fuckin’ hungry.

Worried about Fukushima radiation? There's an app for that.

Wed, 30 May 2012 22:17:53 +0900

In the first weeks of the Fukushima disaster, my friend’s mother talked him into withdrawing approximately $5000 in cash from the bank despite living inland hundreds of kilometers from the reactor. Several others received radiation badges from home along with hand-written tear-stained notes pleading with them to flee the country at once. Another ALT’s parent tried to send a fully-functional ten pound Geiger counter into the country (apparently this is a customs nightmare). Well, now the Japanese mobile phone industry is stepping up and filling that need.

(Reuters) - Mobile phone operator Softbank Corp said on Tuesday it would soon begin selling smartphones with radiation detectors, tapping into concerns that atomic hotspots remain along Japan’s eastern coast more than a year after the Fukushima crisis.

Some commentators are asking: what next? A Godzilla warning system?

Photo by Derek Doi

Media outlets outside of Japan seem unaware that Godzilla detectors have been in all Softbank phones since the company (then J-Phone) introduced an early warning system in 2002 built on technology developed for the Japanese SpaceGodzilla program of 1994. These detectors and the Godzilla Jouhou (情報) Information System Manager (Godzilla JISM) saved countless lives in the Tokyo S.O.S. disaster of 2003 and the Final Wars of 2004.

Godzilla has not appeared in Japan since. However, scientists have warned that fallout from the 1998 NYC incident Codename Bueller may result in another attack on the United States in the near future.