My Blog of Japan Japan!

iPhone Japan - Standing in Line

After hearing that Omotesando was closed down, I got up early and headed down to my local Softbank shop at 5:30 this morning. I needn’t have worried, cos there was noone there yet. At 6:00, the next iPhone fan arrived, an otaku kind of guy. At 7:00, a very genki oyaji came along, he was super chatty and told everyone that he was getting it in Japan cos his son in America said that he US version wouldn’t work with Japanese input. Then slowly more people arrived. Another otaku type went to the shop and got us all canned coffee! About 8, the only woman arrived. She wanted to get the white 16 gig version. At 9:00, the Softbank guy came out and gave us all tickets so that we could come back later and claim our iPhone. I’ll have to go to AU now and get a cancellation ticket so I can transfer my number over.

I asked what I needed to bring along, but the guy didn’t say anything about the 27 month visa limit. He just said that if I was using an Alien Registration card, that I’d need to bring along my bank details. He said the only ways I could pay were by bank transfer of credit card transfer. I’ll find out later about the 27 month thing.

iPhone Japan Launch Details

A few details from a friend working in a Softbank shop..

Only 10 phones are going to be delivered. It’s a small shop, but that’s a very small number. The shipment will only arrive tomorrow.

Phone calls were coming in all day asking if they could reserve. The policy at the shop was no reservations, you have to line up on Friday.

For foreign residents of Japan, you have to have a valid visa with at least 29 (!) months left. This seems a bit crazy, since most foreigners in Japan have at most a 3 year visa (ie 36 months) so you would have had to just gotten your visa. Or have a marriage or permanent visa.

The only alternative is to buy the phone outright, which will cost about 70,000 yen. Supposedly, you’d get a plan cheaper than the 7,200 yen that’s currently on offer, since you wouldn’t be paying the monthly charge for the phone. I heard that it comes out to about the same price.

You have to sign up for a 26 month plan, not 24 month.

You need to bring your alien registration card, possibly also a passport and credit card.

There is definitely no place to hang dangly Hello Kitty straps.

Best Place to Buy Keyboards in Tokyo

Here’s the best keyboard shop that I’ve found in Tokyo. It’s in Akihabara, about 5 minutes walk from the station, in a small alley. It’s called Cleverly and there are 3 separate stores. Only one of them does all keyboards, but they’re all close together, so just ask if you land in the wrong one. Here’s the link.

http://www.clevery.co.jp/shop/shop-2.html

They have plenty of different keyboards to buy, like Filco, Happy Hacking, Microsoft. They have both Japanese layout keyboards and American (US ascii) layout, all nicely set out so you can try the action on them. As far as Filco keyboards go, last time I was there there were about 10 or 15 to choose from, with Alps and Cherry switches, as well as a Bluetooth wireless keyboard. They have more PC keyboards, but have a few specifically for mac, including the very stylish mac happy hacking keyboard.

Along with keyboards, there are mice and other accessories, but the main focus is keyboards. If you want to see Akihabara keyboard Otaku, this is the place to come. The only problem is that it’s a tiny shop, and all the geeks have their Otaku standard backpacks on. Combine that with the cup ramen and pizza diet and it’s hard to get past. Here’s the details of the shop:

Map: http://mymapofjapan.com/spot.php?id=k3ad5v

Cleverly No. 2

Chiyoda-ku, Soto Kanda 3 Chome 13-2

クレバリー２号店

東京都千代田区外神田3丁目13番2号

Telephone: 03-5296-1775

Opening Hours: 11:00 - 20:00
Sunday, Holidays: 19:30

Click on the link above for a map.

List of Bookshops in Tokyo

Here’s an excellent list of the major bookshops in Tokyo. It seems to be updated regularly (last update was a few days ago) and includes places that have closed as well as the ones that are still open.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/jp-tokyo.htm

List of Libraries in Tokyo

Here’s a great list of all the libraries in the Tokyo area. It’s all in Kanji, but you can run it through a translator to find the one you need. This is probably going to be my next project for scraping, translating and mapping.

http://www.reference-net.jp/lib_dir/13.html

Here’s a page with links to libraries throughout Japan, organised by prefecture.

Update: Here’s a list of libraries in Japan I found in English, from YellowPagesJapan. Not sure how up to date it is, but I guess libraries don’t change all that often.

Searching for a Japanese Telephone Number

I got a call from an unknown number on my Keitai but didn’t answer it. It looked like a business number with repeating parts (043-224-1010) and I knew that it was in Chiba by the first 3 digits. Being paranoid, instead of calling it back I went and searched on the internet. It turns out that the best way to search is to break the number into 3 parts like above and search for that. If you search for 0432241010, it comes back with nothing useful. I put 千葉 into the search too, and came back with Yodobashi Camera in Chiba city.

Since google maps has business phone numbers with their address data, searching for the number (in the correct form) comes up with Yodobashi as well, along with a nice pointer on the map.

JR Train Station Maps

Japan Rail has a great page with maps of many major stations. I didn’t like the way they pop out a new page for every one, so I wrote a quick parser to grab all the links. Here’s the pages for individual station maps. Most are in Tokyo, but a few are further away (eg Niigata).

JR Abiko Station Map

JR Airport Terminal 2 (Narita Airport) Station Map

JR Akabane Station Map

JR Akihabara Station Map

JR Akita Station Map

JR Aomori Station Map

JR Asagaya Station Map

JR Bakurocho Station Map

JR Ebisu Station Map

JR Fukushima Station Map

JR Gotanda Station Map

JR Hachinohe Station Map

JR Hamamatsucho Station Map

JR Harajuku Station Map

JR Hatchobori Station Map

JR Higashi-Nakano Station Map

JR Ichigaya Station Map

JR Iidabashi Station Map

JR Ikebukuro Station Map

JR Itabashi Station Map

JR Jujo Station Map

JR Kamata Station Map

JR Kameari Station Map

JR Kanamachi Station Map

JR Kanda Station Map

JR Kashiwa Station Map

JR Kita-Kogane Station Map

JR Kita-Senju Station Map

JR Koenji Station Map

JR Komagome Station Map

JR Matsudo Station Map

JR Meguro Station Map

JR Mejiro Station Map

JR Minami-Kashiwa Station Map

JR Minami-Nagareyama Station Map

JR Minami-Senju Station Map

JR Nakano Station Map

JR Narita Airport Terminal 1 Station Map

JR Niigata Station Map

JR Nippori Station Map

JR Nishi-Nippori Station Map

JR Nishi-Ogikubo Station Map

JR Ochanomizu Station Map

JR Ogikubo Station Map

JR Oimachi Station Map

JR Oji Station Map

JR Okachimachi Station Map

JR Omiya Station Map

JR Omori Station Map

JR Osaki Station Map

JR Otsuka Station Map

JR Sendai Station Map

JR Shibuya Station Map

JR Shimbashi Station Map

JR Shim-Matsudo Station Map

JR Shinagawa Station Map

JR Shinjuku Station Map

JR Shin-Nihombashi Station Map

JR Shin-Okubo Station Map

JR Sugamo Station Map

JR Suidobashi Station Map

JR Tabata Station Map

JR Takadanobaba Station Map

JR Tamachi Station Map

JR Tokyo Station Map

JR Toride Station Map

JR Ueno Station Map

JR Yamagata Station Map

JR Yokohama Station Map

JR Yotsuya Station Map

JR Yoyogi Station Map

JR Yurakucho Station Map

How to buy Ghibli Museum Tickets in Japan

Going to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is almost as difficult as getting into the Emperors palace. There’s no way to buy tickets at the door and even buying them in advance is tough. The easiest way to get them is to go to a Lawsons combini (at a quiet time) and ask the shopkeeper to help you find tickets on the Loppi machine. If you get a nice shopkeeper, and one who knows how to use the machine, they’ll walk you through the process.If you can go on a weekday, there should be no problem, but if you’re restricted to going on Saturday or Sunday, you have to compete with the other thousands of punters who want to go. This means booking far in advance.

You can buy tickets for the Ghibli museum for any of 4 times each day, 10, 12, 2 and 4. The museum closes at 6pm, so as you’d expect, the 4pm tickets are the least popular. The Loppi system is hit and miss, and when I tried it, I couldn’t find a way to look at a calendar and see which days were free. Luckily, there’s a web page which shows the information for the next 2 months. This page is all in Japanese, but the important parts are the times in the calendar and the blue text. An x next to the time for a day means it’s sold out. An o means it’s still available. The blue text above the calendar shows “Ghibli No Hi”, the day the tickets for the following month go on sale. In the picture below, it’s November 12th, a Monday. If you can get to a Lawsons at the time they give (10am) you should have a good chance of buying tickets for the time you want.

Pilot G2 Pen @ 168 yen

After reading lots of impassioned accounts of the slick writing and general goodness of the Pilot G2 gel ink pen, I was passing by the stationary shop at work and decided on impulse to pop in and see if they had any. I bought one for ¥168, looking forward to seeing how much those American fools would pay for the honour of owning the same thing. As it turned out, it’s not that much more than fools in Japan pay for owning it. Jet Pens has them for roughly the same price as here in Japan.

I didn’t check the width when I bought it, and got one that’s a bit too fat (0.7). I still don’t really see what all the fuss is about with this pen, it’s the same as Moleskines, just a fad that’s in at the moment. I still like the Zebra Tapli better, or the cheapy Prismee by Zebra which I nicked from a real estate agent.

Bubble Kenchiku Go! Magazine

Last weekend I went into my local bookstore after work and found a great new magazine there called Baburu Kenchiku Go! It’s all about architecture made around the time of the Japanese Bubble years, from the mid-80s to the early 90s. The buildings built then show a great optimism and willingness to experiment, but also a lot of excess and kookiness for the sake of it. Here’s the front cover:

The first thing that I noticed about this magazine was the strange spine stitching. It’s stitched so that the red thread used to hold the pages together is showing. There’s even a little bit of it sticking out at the end. It’s original, but messes with the design inside a bit, as they didn’t seem to allow enough space for the extra width this takes out of the inside pages. The next thing I noticed was the price (as I had started thinking about buying it) a crazy ¥1600! Well, it’s printed on nice paper I guess. There was only one of them in the shop, obviously the buyer didn’t have much confidence in it being a big seller. There was one copy in another magazine shop I went to later. Maybe they’re going for coolness-by-rarity.

In the end, the reason I ended up plunking down a big chunk of cash for it was the big page spread of the Egg of Wind, one of the places I’ve put into my map of japan. It’s part of a tour you can do around Tokyo, which is mapped for you a few pages on. Other places on the tour include Scala, Beam, Cinema Rise and what looks like a Koban in Shibuya. I’m looking forward to doing the tour.

They also have a piece about Terazza, which as far as I can remember is in my little Tokyo Architecture book. I’ll have to dig it out and have a look.