Year: 2007

Categories
Music

夕焼小焼け – Yuyake Koyake

After some time living in Japan I realized everyday at 5PM in many places you could hear a 30 seconds catchy melody. You can usually listen it near schools, city halls and official buildings; they use pretty powerful speakers, if you are walking around Tokyo at 5PM is very probable that you will listen it.

The song is used as a signal, it means that Japanese children finish school and can go home. The title is Yuyake Koyake (夕->Sunset 焼->Burn 小->Little 焼け -> Burn), “Yuyake” means something like “the red sunset sky” and Koyake “the after sunset orange sky”.

The song was composed by a school teacher called Nakamura Uko eighty years ago. Nakamura Uko was born in Hachiouji, in that city there is bus stop called Yuyake Koyake.

Here you have many Yuyake Koyake versions I found on the net:


Yuyake Koyake was made for Japanese children.

This is the song lyric:

１　夕焼け 小焼けで 日（ひ）が暮（く）れて
山（やま）のお寺（てら）の 鐘（かね）がなる
おててつないで みなかえろう 烏（からす）と いっしょに かえりましょう
　
２　子供（こども）が かえった あとからは
まるい大（おお）きな お月（つき）さま
小鳥（ことり）が夢（ゆめ）を 見（み）るころは 空（そら）には きらきら 金（きん）の星（ほし）

The sunset is the end of the day,
the bell from the mountain temple rings
hand by hand let’s go back home together with the crows.

After the children are back at home
a big and round moon shines,
when the birds dream, the brightness from the stars fills the sky.

Categories
Society

Bookstore without vigilance

I’m from Spain, a country where there are many cameras inside any kind of shops and the employees are always looking if you do any suspicious movement. In Japan, I was surprised when I first saw some supermarkets where some stuff is “outside” the shop area, there is not a big difference between inside and outside in many Japanese shops, it seems they trust the clients.

Here are some pictures I took in a bookstore at Tokyo’s city center.


Many Japanese reading magazines outside the shop. If you want to buy one of them, you have to bother and enter the shop to pay.


Look at the entrance, there is not a big difference between inside and outside.

Categories
Sex

Trash cans for adult magazines – 白いポスト

20-30 years ago there were many trash bins called “Shiroi Posto” (白いポスト – White mailbox). Nowadays you can still found some “Shiroi Posto” in little villages around Japan, but they are not very common.

These trash cans/mailboxes are used to dispose magazines, films, or whatever erotic/pornographic good that you don’t want to have at home in case you are having problems to hide it from your parents. Lets say that Japanese designed it as a service for adolescents.

A website from a city called “Hashima” explains it: “In order to keep your mental and physical health, beloved adolescents! please use this mailbox to dispose those magazines or books that you don’t want to keep at home”.


“Shiroi Posto”, a special mailbox for sexual goods

Some Japanese told me that they idea to create these special trash bins surged from the problems that some villages had when they started to find “illegal garbage dumps full of sex magazines” at the entrance of the forest, near the river or in hidden places inside parks; a friend of mine confessed me that he got his first erotic movie from the border of the nearest forest from his home 15 years ago.

In the big cities “Shiori posto” never proliferated (It seems that is easier to dispose discreetly a magazine in Japanese cities than in Japanese villages). In fact, in many Japanese little towns and villages you can still find “Shiroi posto” , in this website you can go through a collection of “Shiroi posto” that are still active and the places where the pictures where taken.

I wonder if in the future we will have specialized trash cans for doll disposal 😉