Bargain Shopping and Fukubukuro 2010

In Japan, as soon as New Years Day is over, a wonderful thing begins: BARGAIN SHOPPING. I guess it’s sort of like black friday in America (though I don’t think I’ve ever like, left my house on Black Friday so I’m not sure) but almost everything is on sale, particularly on Jan. 2nd and 3rd, and since everyone is on holiday until the 4th, you damn well better go shopping.

The second awesome thing that happens during bargain season is 福袋 (fukubukuro) or a grab bag basically, where a bunch of unknown contents from a particular store are put into a bag, and sealed so you can’t see them or know what you’re buying, and then sold for a price that’s way lower than the total of the individual items. Of course, there may be stuff you don’t want, but hey that’s where the luck comes in (direct translation of fukubukuro = luck bag).

So this year, I decided to do my first bargain shopping in Osaka upon returning from Tokyo. Since January 1st and 2nd are holidays, the post offices are closed, and that’s the only place where I can withdraw cash, I made the wise decision to not really shop in Tokyo (also I didn’t really have a lot of time). Unfortunately at the end of my Tokyo trip I was left with 2000 yen (about $20), and was extremely concerned about my ability to shop in Umeda like I had planned with Yuka (I was also concerned about whether I had enough cash to get back to Yuka’s house). Luckily, at the last minute wandering around Tokyo station, I found a post office where just the ATM part was open. Woohoo!

The bullet train arrived in Shin-Osaka and I changed trains headed for Umeda, and arrived with about an hour to spare before I was supposed to meet Yuka. So I searched around a long time for a coin locker to throw all my stuff in from Tokyo. Then I ate takoyaki at this place by the station where you have to stand and eat, and OH MY GOD IT WAS DELICIOUS:

Then I walked around looking for HEP (a 7 or so story high mall, basically, filled with happiness and delight and WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE), which I actually failed to find for a while. I did find a good place to buy tights though, and did that. Then Yuka showed up, and we spent about 30 minutes trying to find each other inside the station. Tip for Umeda: find a good place to meet people!! This should have gone for Asakusa on January 1st as well — I spent half an hour trying to find Ben doing the whole “well now I’m near a building that looks like this… and uhh… yeah I’m gonna walk that direction now” thing. Not effective.

(I am also extremely nervous because tomorrow I’m meeting a friend in Umeda again. Except this friend does not have a cell phone. Praying to the 待ち合わせ gods now.)

I finally found Yuka and we began to scour every floor and every shop in all of HEP. I came back with a variety of good loot.

Most notably, I now have all the clothes necessary to complete the incredibly popular ensemble that looks totally normal here but would make me look like a freak back home: suspender shorts, black tights, and knee-high high-heeled boots. Hopefully I can incorporate all of these items into some outfits that are America-appropriate once I go home :/ suggestions welcome.

So after a long and fruitful day of shopping, Yuka and I went home for a delicious dinner of nabe and warm yumminess. Yuka’s cousin was also visiting that evening. It turns out that since Yuka’s mom heard that I like Japanese clothes (true story), she bought me a fukubukuro!! from this store in Sannomiya I’d been to a few days before with Yuka. Upon opening it up… the contents are revealed to be:

1) A bright purple shiny furry coat. WIN. (Just like the one purple jacket boy had)
2) A grey scarf. Also excellent.
3) A long-sleeved argyle grey shirt. The same color I would have picked out myself.
4) A brown knit dress. Already wore this, so another success.
5) Cargo pants. Way too small. FAIL. I do not plan on losing enough weight to wear them.

My fukubukuro:

Overall, there was quite a bit of luck in this luck bag. I love you, fukubukuro!

I also partook in an edible fukubukuro from Bagel & Bagel: a bunch of random bagel flavors in a bag. LUCKY for me, there was a matcha flavored one. WIN!!!

In conclusion, fukubukuros are awesome!

Japanese New Years 2010

It’s a little different than the American party-till-you-drop technique of welcoming the new year.

December 31: Yuka had stayed up until 6 am working on her nengajou (new years greeting cards). Her mom had woken up at 5 am to start making osechi ryouri (traditional new years food), and around 5:30 they crossed paths. I woke up around 10 and knew I had some time before Yuka would wake up, so I went into Kobe and did some shopping and internetting. I stopped by Ikuta Jinja, the temple in Sannomiya. They were in the middle of setting up all the booths for food, since all temples become a swarm of festivity on new years day as everyone files in to go do their 初詣 (hatsumode, first shrine visit of the new year). However, as it was December 31st, I went to the shrine, and did hatsumode for 2009, pretty much at the last possible minute. But since I haven’t been to Japan in 2.5 years and I’m pretty sure I didn’t go to any shinto shrines in America during 2009, I think it’s safe to say that this visit was successful hatsumode.

I haven’t done hatsumode for 2010 yet, but I have a little while before I leave this country. It will happen.

Anyway, I came home, hung out with Yuka, and then it was time to eat soba for dinner, as toshi-koshi-soba, in addition to being a really great word, is the traditional New Year’s Even dinner. Something about soba noodles being long and that bringing longevity and luck into the new year. Then we turned on the TV to watch some Kouhaku, the red-vs-white Japanese pop music showdown. The ratio of good wholesome j-pop to enka (think “Japanese old people music”) was rather low, so we ended up watching more Gaki no Tsukai than anything else. Whoops. I took a bath and came into the living room again about 15 minutes before midnight, just in time for the Johnny’s Countdown.

The Johnny’s Countdown is AMAZING.

Every boy band in Japan for the last 25 years or so is present, dolled up and ready to perform (and yes, even after decades, Japanese boy bands never die. They just get older and involved in more nudity scandals… yes SMAP, I mean you.) They each sing a song, but you don’t even have to sit through the whole song, just about 30 seconds to 1 minute of the chorus or well-known part of the song. This is likely because (1) there are a LOT of boy bands and fitting them all in the given half-hour timeslot is probably a bit of a crunch and (2) the whole point is to 盛り上がる (get you hyped up) for midnight… and since traditionally the chorus/famous bit of the song is the most exciting, seeing cute boys dancing and energizing you with j-pop goodness in rapid fire with the best parts of the songs (which also happen to be the parts you can certainly sing along to) makes you READY FOR THE NEW YEAR.

Some of these Johnny’s bands are significantly younger than me, some are just old enough to be my parents. But all are dressed in outfits that put most women to shame because I just don’t own anything that SPARKLY, or that PINK. The award for the gayest looking Johnny’s band during countdown-to-2010 goes to: V6, a surprising winner, with the bright pink suits and black sparkly vests. Ohhhh Japanese entertainment.

Also SMAP sucks SO MUCH at singing. Like, I think I’ve seen people sing SMAP songs at karaoke WAY BETTER than SMAP sing themselves.

The Johnny’s Countdown is already on Youtube…

As the clock strikes midnight, we all say yay, and suddenly no one can receive or send any email from their phones because EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON IN JAPAN IS DOING THE SAME THING. I knew this would happen, so I waited until after midnight to even start composing my “happy new year!” email. Around 12:30 the first email hits my phone inbox. Yay, I’m not completely unloved! I eventually manage to send out my email to the 10 friends or so who are in my phone. I gotta say, much easier than trying to time it with sending emails at 9 am on December 31st from the midwest (which I fucked up last year and felt really lame about). And yes, it is that important to send them exactly when it becomes the new year. This is Japan, people, you’d better damn well be ON TIME.

Yuka’s family decided that since I was there, they’d go for the Japanese tradition of watching the sunrise on New Years Day. We left the house around 6:45 to drive up this mountain in Rokko where you could see the entire Kobe area, and the ocean in the morning twilight. It was beautiful.

(pictures to come once Yuka sends me hers)

However, since it was 6 am, it was actually kinda cold. REALLY COLD for Japan. Which is somewhere around freezing. Nothing too difficult to handle. The high for that day was 9°C(50°F). The high back home was -9°C(16°F). Yup. So this was not really a problem for me and my gaijin ways, but all the Japanese people around (and there were a LOT of them who came out to see the sun rise) were jumping up and down shouting samui! the entire time. The horizon was kind of cloudy, so we had to wait much longer than we should have until the sun actually rose high enough to break through the clouds.

In the meantime, more people showed up, including two gaijin dudes who were around my age. They were in shorts and tshirts, and one of them had some underarmour and maybe a hat. They had clearly just been working out (probably running) and stopped by to see the sunrise on the way. There was a group of Japanese college students to the right of us, who kept having amusing conversations. At one point one of the girls looked over at the two gaijin dudes, and she blurted out,

「外人、平気過ぎ！！！」 (The gaijin are way too NOT COLD!! (why do they not appear to be suffering???))

And it was true, the two guys were way comfier in their shorts and tshirts than all the other bundled-up jumping-up-and-down locals.

Since the clouds were so strangely thick it was hard to know when the sun was going to peek out of them. It was getting brighter and brighter, and soon there was this oval-shaped orb of light between two sets of clouds – some kind of reflection going on. People started wondering whether maybe that was actually the sun and it was just being obstructed. College students next to us were like “I’m fucking cold, can we just count that as the sun and go home??” and “I guess the sun is oval-shaped today… that’s fine with me”

It was a little weird to be in a group of people were we all were not entirely sure whether or not that was THE SUN. Kinda basic stuff.

Finally, a giant shining beam of light that was unmistakably the ACTUAL sun came out from the clouds, like BAM!! Oh god, it’s SO BRIGHT. The hundred people around all kept being like “oh hey, this is it!! There it is!!” and whipping out their cell phones to take pictures. Wooo! After 45 minutes of waiting, SUCCESS. We left before we were all actually blinded by the light.

I packed my things for my two-day excursion to Tokyo that would commence around 10 am. Before that, we ate the osechi ryori that Yuka’s mom had prepared. I remember not being crazy about some of the new-years food last time I was here, but most of this was pretty good! I ate way too much, drank sake, and life was good. I then hopped on the bullet train headed for Tokyo, the land of way too many people, trains, and banana flavored snack items.