These veggies showed up at my local Ito Yokado about a year ago. Each one has a line drawing of the (Japanese) face and name of the farmer responsible for the crop.
I’m not certain there’s a significant difference in quality, but it’s a clever way to calm food source paranoias in a country where American beef with spinal tissue and frozen Chinese dumplings laced with rat poison lead the nightly news.
With this entry I will fulfill blog cliche #23, by giving you a bullet-point list of things happening after a long silence:
I’ve been eating out a lot these days, so when I cook at home, I try to catch up on the vegetables. But without a lot of time to fuss with complex sauces or multi-step cooking, I’ve been trying to do a lot with a little.
Insipired by Eiko while she’s away.
In product development, lesser manufacturers often frontload their attention onto the pre-purchase experience. Only good manufacturers care what happens once their product enters your home, and only the most conscientious care what happens once their product leaves your home.
The same can be said of restaurants. Lesser chefs dazzle you with fancy names, cheap prices or insane portions, better chefs make sure you enjoy every bite. But I wonder how many chefs consider everything that happens after you swallow?
I’m not talking about poisoning or obesity here, just the couple of hours after the meal. Are there certain cuisines or dishes that put you in the same physical or mental state, good or bad, every time you eat them? Do you modify your choices, or eat whatever tastes good, regardless of the consequences? Do you know any chefs who consider this when creating a menu?
I had dinner with Paul and Craig at the New York Bar and Grill at the top of the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, a planned indulgence, after a rocky start to 2007. I lost all sense of time and place. My first steak in almost a year, and I’d wait another year for the next one if I can have it there again. I think there are two reasons: First, being the client is tough work. It’s easy to take for granted how much client’s have to do to keep a project moving: gathering and editing content, scheduling photo shoots, building consensus. When we become our own clients, we are effectively doubling the workload we are used to for a website, and often chipping away at this workload off hours.
Secondly, good design projects are conversations between client and designer, who check and balance each other, propelling the project forward in the process. Without another team on the other side to volley back, you have to continually step under the net, adjust your perspective, pick up the ball and hit it back over.
While there are always one or two beauties, with the iPhone on its way, it’s become even clearer to me that the Japanese carriers release way too many phones. Their approach seems to be to split up the market into as many demographic segments as they can, and give each their own phone with it’s own brand message, form, color and feature set. This seems like a slightly more evolved variation on the “spray and pray” approach that you see with a lot of less fashionable Japanese consumer electronics, for which they long ago gave up on searching for names that don’t read like serial numbers.
Maybe this makes business sense, but it’s sure is dispiriting if you look for an aesthetic coherency from model to model, season to season.
Photo by Paul.
As far as I can tell, it’s generally considered bad manners in Japan to eat, and to a much lesser degree, drink outside.
There are of course several allowances. Anything served at outdoor festivals, quick shots of canned coffee. But outside of these, you just don’t see Japanese people put much to their mouth outside of homes and restaurants.
This makes perfect sense to me. When they can, the Japanese like to take their time with meals. They fuss over presentation, balance and sequence. There is a whole vocabulary for eating that spans past the easy senses of taste and smell, into touch and hearing. How could any of this possibly be enjoyed wedged between meetings on opposite sides of town?
Besides, in many less restrained cultures than Japan, eating is the most flamboyant bodily function that humans can engage in with mixed company. Eating outside imposes all kinds of potential irritations on strangers. Maybe they haven’t eaten yet today, so your soft bite into an onigiri taunts them. Maybe they just ate, so the smell of your everything bagel nauseates them. Or maybe they’re just having a really bad day, and the last thing they need is for you to spray droplets of melted banana java chip Frappucino onto their suit jacket while they hang from the hand straps in a Ginza Line subway car, gently swaying.
But this has been a tough adjustment for me. I survived the last eight or so years of my schooling eating chunks of bagels in the back of math class, food that requires utensils while driving, and entire fast food meals while jogging across campus. In Japan, I struggle to delay gratification until I find a quiet, stationary stage for the performance of a 3-part symphony of mixed sandwiches.
Which is why this ad in Kudanshita station touched me so. A single line of copy and a simple photograph together defy all this nonsense and make it ok again for me to inhale soft serve in front of ampm.
Japanese print ads have always been more interesting to me than I remember American ads, though the reason probably says more about me than it does about the quality of the ads, namely that:
In addition to keeping my discretionary spending on hair gel and trashy weeklies down, this total communication breakdown has made it easier to pass the time on my commute, deciphering and dissecting these ads. But one gaijin can only take it so far, so I’ve decided to share a few cases here, starting with this series from Mos Burger.
This campaign is running on the Tokyo Metro trains to promote new recipes on Mos Burger’s core products, the Mos Burger and the Teriyaki Burger.
The train ads are as simple as you can get: a product shot, 3 lines of copy, product name, and the company logo and tagline, but let’s try to pull this apart (click on the image to follow along):
Though somewhat at odds with where these MOS ads started, with history, perseverence and reputation, this tagline is perhaps what fast food does best even if it’s for the worst. It places a solution within reach, to answer an urge from within, right now.