Year: 2007

One of the things I really hate about Tokyo are crows. Yes! Noisy and annoying crows that are all over Tokyo metropolitan area. They wake you up Saturday morning at five in the morning when they start cawing, they bother you while you walk to your work because they are always trying to catch food from the garbage and they are ugly-big-scary. I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t like them. Crow population in Tokyo was 7.000 in 1985 and now is around 40.000, the number of people complaining is increasing, and you can count the number of people being attacked by crows by thousands.

Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara, a pretty radical guy, is doing at least one good thing, he is trying to stop these annoying birds. Tokyo’s government created a “special commando” whose only purpose is “crow extermination”. This commando is starting to destroy nests and kill crows all around Tokyo. I didn’t really notice any difference yet but let’s be patient.

The only “good” thing is that you can take crow pictures pretty easily even without zoom.

Another measure they adopted is to give 50.000 blue nets for free so Tokyo’s citizens cover their garbage bags when they put them outside their homes in the morning, it happens that in Tokyo they don’t use garbage dumpsters or any other type of “recipient” that could hide it from the crows. It’s pretty easy for the crows to eat in a city like Tokyo.

I saw this add walking around Shibuya.

It says: “It’s the season of congratulations for your entrance to the University, but please refrain from drinking beer till you are 20”. It seems that Japanese like to start drinking alcohol when they start university when they are 18 even though it is not permitted to drink till 20. It’s a big problem that is even worse in Japan because their body doesn’t really tolerate big amounts of alcohol. They lack an enzyme called low-Km aldehyde dehydrogenase isoenzima that makes them to become drunk faster than other people

The previous ad is a campaign that wants to stop underage drinkers, they even have a website called stop-underagedrinking.com. The interesting point is that in the add they make special emphasizes in the word “beer” (ビール), and if you look more carefully the campaign is sponsored by many Japanese beer brewery companies. Suspicious, interesting, smart? If you were the president of a beer company would you pay to make a similar campaign against drinking? Do they want to clean their image?