Oh, you are a running freak? Running several kilometers every morning and dreaming, some day, to be able to finish a full marathon within a respectable time record?

Oh yes, I know. You have trouble keeping your own pace for each of your morning sessions. Sure, if you run a fixed course everyday, and know the distance of the course well, only thing you need is a stopwatch. You can calculate the lap/pace/speed quite easily.

But not many people have this accurate information. Or, say, you decide to run a new attractive course. Then your feeling of pace setting would be somehow in murky waters.

Casio GPR-100 GPS speedometer.No bulky GPS receiver unit. No wireless string attached. Price, 54,000 yen ((US$470).

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Maneki-neko "Customer-welcoming cat". ManekiTV's title was inspired with this cat.

Sony products have a nasty tendency to get inolved with serious legal battles. The most famous and important one was the 1984 Betamax case. For this epic battle, Sony firmly stood up and did not bend its knees against almighty Hollywood bullies. And because of its final victory, consumers all over the world could buy up millions of VTRs, DVD gear, harddisk recorders and, eventually, iPods, too.

This year's case was not so noisy, Sony being just a side-player this time.

Tokyo District Court quietly dismissed, on August 5, an application for provisional disposition. The national public TV channel NHK and other five TV biggies, hand in hand, had applied this proposition to suspend the service, called ManekiTV, run by one Nagano-Shouten of Tokyo.
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Whitegoods are dull. Nobody takes them seriously. Once dominant Japanese manufacturers have completely surrendered these menial commodities to Korean and Chinese firms, they keep on building basically the same old box year after year, although they are making it cheaper and cheaper. In this area at least, their creative mind goes only skin deep. Milliards of colors and printed patterns. Gothic, art nouveau, classic Tang dynasty style, and so on.

An extravaganza like a Dayglo polka-dotted refrigerator in pre-Islamic Jahiliyya style, with a built-in anti-burglar system... but, had Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison peeped into its innards, they would have understood all functions immediately.

A few years ago, a strange wind started blowing through the Japanese whitegoods market. Incredible curiosities, things like a US$1,000 rice cooker, or US$2,000 washing machine. Not a Korean/Chinese cosmetic surgery whitegood, but really innovative and terribly expensive gadgets.

Take the electric oven. This staple of kitchens all over the world is classified even a step lower than the regular whitegood. Nobody notices what manufacturer built it. Anyway it's built-in, usually. You don't have a chance to buy it at an appliance market.
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The baseline which divides Japanese and non-Japanese clearly and neatly, is thermal. Those who flourish in the scalding hot bath and those who get parboiled in it and perish. A kind of thermocline division. Anybody can enjoy Akihabara, but nobody can cross this ordeal of thermocline if he has not grown up in Japan.

On the hither side of thermocline we swarm. No regular TV can suvive in this hellish atmosphere.

So, we jump into boiling hot water every evening, even in sweltering hot summer, and spend a few hours of busy relax-and-scrub sessions. And always wonder why those other people pretend they are clean enough after some 10 seconds under tepid shower nozzle. In some countries, the per capita consumption of deodorant far surpasses the whole computer games expense, while nobody ever heard of deodorant in Japan.

Your Mobile Ojisan, too, dedicates a huge chunk of evening hours to this ritual pastime. Usually, he brings in a couple of books to read. Unfortunately, no books are made damp-proof. After half an hour of steaming in bathroom, they become pretty soggy and heavy. That's my only complaint.
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Can you really prove that you are you? Especially in the environment where red tape dominates? This Kafkaesque proposition is getting rather serious in this time of rampant electronic identity thievery.

Sure, in quite a few countries, carte d'identite works fine for this purpose. Where no nationwide identity card system exists, cocktail of papers are needed, like America. Socical security number, driver's license, birth certificate and the likes.

No national identity card or birth certificate exists in Japan. Therefore, the one and only proof of one's identity remains hanko, his personal seal.

This hanko business, of course, had been introduced from ancient China, first at the time of Han dynasty, and is still flourishing strongly. Only Japan and South Korea keep this hanko system presently. The very originator, China, has abandoned it long, long time ago.
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