Here’s some spinach I bought in my local Ito Yokado supermarket, which has a picture of the farmer who produced it. I’ve often seen pictures of happy looking farmers above the Japan-produced vegetables in my supermarket, but this is the first time I’ve seen it included in the actual packaging. I like the personal touch it gives, knowing that your veggies were made by a human, not a big hulking farmotron robot. There’s even a QR code which links to a page with more infomation about the farmer. (You should be able to point your keitai at the screen here to link to it.)

more pictures after the jump..

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In Japan, there are many ways to get your caffeine fix, from Starbucks to Doutor to Mr. Donuts. If you’re cheap like me though, you’ll get it from the combini. When I first got here, I was amazed at the little cans of hot coffee that are sold through the winter, but now I prefer the cold cup-like coffee that comes in specially shaped containers, made to look like the classy cuppa you’d get from Starbucks. They have a plastic top, which is just for show since the coffee is kept in by a foil seal. It’s another thing which has just become a signal to say ‘This is an expensive tasting cup of coffee’. My favourite for a long time has been Mount Rainer. It’s the cheapest (137 yen!) and tastes smooth and creamy, not like the harsh taste from canned milk coffee.

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OK, it’s a joke that only geeks are really going to get, but I came across this bizarrely named beauty salon near Spinshell Towers in Akabane.

For those of you who don’t know what Unix is, it’s a big operating system used in many servers. It can only be considered beautiful and loved by computer geeks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

We’ve been getting a lot of attention for Ai’s 2008 Tokyo cherry blossom article, so I thought I’d write a quick guide to using Yahoo Japan and their hanami prediction pages. Yahoo has loads of great content for Japan, but navigating through the Kanji can be difficult. I always use their weather service, but this is the first year I’ve ever tried their sakura map. And now with the sakura in full bloom, choosing where to spend these precious days is important business!

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In this season, everyone on the train is coughing and hacking away with the seasonal cold. I’m not immune and last week I finally caught my yearly march flu. So to pump up my vitamin-c intake, I popped into the local Livre Keisei, the supermarket just near my train station, to get some mikans.

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