Tuesday June 23
 
10:36
 
The ‘IC You’ Card

I hate having to carry around an “Alien Registration Card” which includes my full address - on top of burglary risk I have the continual daily risk that should my keys and wallet be lost together, thieves have a direct path to my home. Paranoid? My apartment had already been burgled once in Japan - I don’t want to make it any easier.

Now we have the new gaijin card. Yeah!

That’s still not the worst of it. I mentioned that embedded computer chip. The ZRK is a “smart card.” Most places worldwide issue smart cards for innocuous things like transportation and direct debit, and you have to swipe the card on a terminal to activate it. Carrying one is, at least, optional.

Not in Japan. Although the 2005 proposal suggested foreign “swiping stations” in public buildings, the technology already exists to read IC cards remotely. With Japan’s love of cutting-edge gadgets, data processing will probably not stop at the swipe. The authorities will be able to remotely scan crowds for foreigners.

In other words, the IC chip is a transponder — a bug.

Now imagine these scenarios: Not only can police scan and detect illegal aliens, but they can also uncover aliens of any stripe. It also means that anyone with access to IC chip scanners (they’re going cheap online) could possibly swipe your information. Happy to have your biometric information in the hands of thieves?

Moreover, this system will further encourage racial profiling. If police see somebody who looks alien yet doesn’t show up on their scanner (such as your naturalized author, or Japan’s thousands of international children), they will more likely target you for questioning — as in: “Hey, you! Stop! Why aren’t you detectable?”

No!

What does “not deemed to be acting like spouses” mean anyway?

And what’s Juki Net? Is it like Mixi for music? Are all gaijins going to be “required” to join Juki-boxu-net and download Japanese J-shit-pop every week?

At least laws here are written down, unlike Korea. Don’t get me started on Korean immigration.

Friday June 12
 
10:05
 
You can’t give a BABY booze!

Monday April 6
 
17:38
 
My Sassy Girl

One of my favourite Korean films, and now available to watch on You Tube:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
The End

All Korean women are like this :) The number of times I’ve seen Korean girls fighting with their boyfriends in bars, slapping them in coffee shops, using neh-seung to get their own way. I quite like it actually..

I actually have the DVD case for this film. I used to have the DVD also until someone stole it!

Wednesday November 12
 
17:52
 
Firestarter

불닭, or Buldalk, is one of the spiciest Korean foods there is. Bul coming for the Chinese character for “fire” and dalk meaning “chicken”, this is a dish in Korea that is so spicy that most Koreans have tried it once, but very few make a habit of it.

Would the restaurant Buldalk in Shibuya, then, live up to its name? Or would is be another spiced-down-for-Japanese tastes experience?

Initial signs were not good - no Korean menu and a Japanese only pen-scanner based ordering system (!) means there’s likely to be few real Koreans going there, unless they’ve lived in Japan for a while. Delving into the menu, I found that to get spicy Buldalk you have to pay extra. What?! So the standard “Fire Chicken” isn’t spicy? You’d expect a restaurant to be able to cook properly the food it named itself after!

We ordered the spicy one. It wasn’t even close to what you’d expect in Korea. Yeah, my Japanese friends were shouting “my mouth hurts, my mouth hurts” and trying to use makoli (막고리) to soothe the pain - but Japanese can’t handle anything spicy. They put one DROP of tabasco sauce on a pizza, for chrissakes.

That said, it shows just how long it has been since I had real Korean food in Korea that I revelled in last night’s offerings. I haven’t had totorimuk (도토리묵) for ages - in fact it’s the first time to find it in Japan.. that alone pleased me! And even though it only had six slivers of totori, the dressing was like heaven. I gobbled it down trying not to think “I paid 1000 yen for this when I’d get five times the amount for free as ’service’ in a Korean bar in Korea.”

The delights of the night in pictures:

불닭 - Buldalk

도토리묵 - Totorimuk

불고기 - Bulgogi

막고리(동동주) - Makkoli (Dongdongju), a Korean alcohol

소주! - Soju!

None of the Japanese “on the rocks” or “with soda” business!

Tuesday October 28
 
18:37
 
Korea Takes Over The World

From the BBC:

The campaign to promote Korean cuisine - launched by the agriculture ministry and the Agro-Fisheries Trade Corporation - aims to quadruple the number of Korean restaurants around the world to 40,000 by 2017.

It will include spending $40m over the next two years to try to make Korean food as famous as French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Thai food.

There are plans to create Korean culinary schools abroad, develop and distribute standard recipes and introduce an official ratings system for overseas restaurants.

The ratings in Tokyo will be: everything-tastes-the-same, cant-cook-for-toffee, and tonjang. Tonjang being the only decent Korean restaurant in Tokyo - everywhere else is crap.

I can only imagine the Korean Restaurant Missionary Ajummas the government will send overseas to “quadruple the number of Korean restaurants around the world”.