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I just spent 91 hours in Japan. This is what it looked like.

Every day on the way to work I walk by a fine establishment known as Yoshinoya (吉野家), Japan’s largest gyudon (牛丼) chain restaurant. For those of you whose lives have yet to be graced by gyudon, it’s a bowl of rice topped with beef and onions stewed in a sweet-savory soy-based sauce. Loving gyudon and being a cheapskate, I naturally noticed the recent 50 yen off gyudon promotion at Yoshinoya. The above photo is a photo of part of that sign.

Part of this sign, though, made me think about our new Ubiquity parser. In particular, it was the attachment ambiguity in the end date of the promotion. The text in the photo above literally is “April 15th (Wed.) 8PM until”. (Note that Japanese is a strongly head-final language, and that the “until” is a postposition.) There are two possible readings for this expression, as illustrated by the two composition trees below.

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From Asiajin:

Softbank Mobile announced today to release 1-seg digital TV tuner device for iPhone in the middle of December. The 80-gram device provides the feature of TV over WiFi (converting TV signal received to IP-based data for iPhone) and doubles as a battery extender. Three hours continuous TV viewing is available.

I’ve seen a number of these ワンセグ (wansegu, 1seg) digital TV tuner-enabled phones around the office and in trains. I’m not a huge TV watcher, even in Japan,¹ but I have to say these phones are pretty cool. In the land of one-hour train commutes, there’s definitely both appeal and demand. I’ve sat on trains next to everyone from hip high schoolers to grandparents watching TV on these phones.

Frankly, however, I think the fact that it’s a separate device (even if it can be unwired) will still limit its attractiveness. I’ll be curious to see what the interface is like.

About two doors down from my new place is a restaurant serving ramen (ラーメン, derived from the Chinese 拉麵), a distinctive type of noodle. Ramen noodles are wheat-based but crucially use kansui (鹹水), a mineral-rich water.¹ This water colors the noodles yellow and helps add a certain firmness to the noodles. The noodles can be served in a variety or different ways (with regional variations as well), but it is most often served in a miso-, soy sauce-, pork broth-, or salt-based soup.

The store down the street is called ichifuku (一福). Not only is it one of the closest restaurants to my house, it’s also been featured on a number of ramen restaurants and websites. The store is known for its delicious miso ramen but also for its more creative, Western-style arrangements. The female shopkeeper is often running everything by herself, gardening out front as well as cooking and playing great music.

Here are some pictures of the great food they serve:

If you ever come by the Hatsudai area, I highly recommend a visit. The address is: 東京都渋谷区本町６−６−４.

I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.

I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]

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Bailey just pointed me to a hilarious series of videos apparently introducing Japanese culture to foreigners, produced by the Japanese comedians Rahmens. Rahmens are incidentally the ones who play Mac and PC in the Japanese versions of the Apple ads.

Here’s one to get you started: