For some reason I have acquired about 150 followers on Twitter, so to try to serve them better and to add a new feature to What Japan Thinks, I will be making occasional Tweets of data from surveys that I choose not to translate in full, and from other sources like TV and newspapers. Also, I might post tips and links, but I’ll try to avoid joining in with the banality on all sides.
If you can’t see what all the fuss is about Twitter, don’t worry as I’m using Twitter Tools, which should summarise all my Tweets once a week and auto-post to this blog.
Mmm, doughtnuts! The theme for this year is doughnuts; the usual association is with cheap efforts from Mister Donuts or the enormous queues for Krispy Kremes, so here they are trying something different by asking cake shops to come up with their own high-end doughnuts. In the picture, the nearest one was Baumkuchen, next was a not overpoweringly sugared apple honey, then mocha chocolate, and strawberry.
A new gadget that is generating quite a bit of buzz around the Japanese English-language blogs is the Poken, with various events having giveaways of the wee beasties, with now JapanSoc also getting in on the act.
What is a Poken? Perhaps this video explains:
It’s basically a portable cache of your social network accounts (actually, pointers to an online cache) so when two pokens meet, they exchange identifiers so back at home you can quickly find out where you can meet all your real-life contacts. Quicker and more accurate than scribbling a phone number or email address on a bit of paper, and for anti-social gits such as myself it saves the business of asking, just a quick high-four and Bob’s your uncle.
The Poken shop shows a few designs, but printing your own would be a fabulous extra feature…
Please indulge my off-topicness for a minute or two as I talk about the Kobe Sweets Festa 2009, an annual cake fair in Kobe.
Their Kobe Sweets blog (Japanese only) introduces many of the patisseries that will be exhibiting their wares at the Festa, to be held on the 8th and 9th floors of Daimaru Motomachi between the 1st and 6th of May 2009. Koeb has a lot of very, very good cake shops, so be sure to find some time during Golden Week to pop down for a cup of tea and cake.
Next Satuday they are having a tasting session, so they need to borrow a few bloggers’ stomachs for the task, so I’d like to put my name forward as willing to stuff my gob full of cake for the benefit of my readers. It’s just one of these hardships I have to put myself though to keep my readers entertained.
I’ve had a wee word with Shane at Nihon Sun, and she would be happy to host me as a guest blogger talking about the event, introducing Kobe Sweets Festa to the English-speaking world.
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