Alan lubin lets the toy decide

Tip number three: Never drop your guard.

If you walk the pavements of Tokyo frequently enough - you will be hit by a bike. The Kamikaze spirit of the Japanese lives on with these two wheeled moving accidents.

No matter if you are on a pedestrian crossing or the pavement, always remember that bikes have right of way and they will often be ridden by somebody with absolutely no spacial awareness. This combined with a dangerously high centre of gravity due to a shopping basket overloaded with shopping, children and dogs - piloted by a cyclist engrossed in coversation on a mobile phone - is your recipe for spending the rest of the week with rubber burns up the back of your legs.

Unhindered by the fact that the cyclist is riding a fully laden womens shopping bike (men and women) these maniacs can reach impressive speeds ensuring that in your time in Tokyo - you will be hit by a bike. And it will be your fault.

Tip number four: Avoid Shinjuku station.

No matter how unavoidable the situation might seem. Never, ever try and and navigate your way around Shinjuku station. That way madness lies. It would take an award winning feat of signage to help even the most ardent traveller direct their way around this hell hole and they didn’t even come close.

There are around 15 different train lines that operate out of what must be the biggest station in the world - and trying to follow the signs is nigh on impossible since they are intermittant at best and more probably just random. The style of the signs completely changes depending on which part of the station you are in and I am almost certain that in the few hours that the station closes at night - mischevious employees alleviate the bordom by switching them all around.

Tip number five: Always wear good socks.

In the UK can afford to be blase about the standard of your hosiery. As laundry day approaches you can, quite rightly, assume that wearing some tatty hole ridden socks will go unnoticed as you can wear your shoes from the second you leave home until the moment of your return. Not so in Japan. In Japan wearing substandard sock wear is like playing a clothing based game of Russian Roulette, with opportunities for humiliation scattered throughout the day.

At any given point in time an uplanned trip to somebodys house, a trip to a restaurant and even a visit to an office can result in the discomfort of trying to walk around whilst gripping the front of your sock with your toes, in order to hide what everyone else in the room is painfully aware of. We all know that everyone in Japan takes their shoes off indoors, of course we do. But as a westerner you will do it with rubbish socks on. And you will only do it the once.

With Unazukin out of reach and my life back in order I have a paradox of sorts. I am able to blog but have no Unazukin to blog about for at least until the end of the week. In view of this I will be using this brief interlude to pass on my limited knowledge about Tokyo until normal service is resumed. I wrote it down in a notepad when my Vaio bit the dust. I feel like Mork. Hello Orson this is Mork calling Orson.. I have learned much of this bizarre and wonderful land..

Tip number one: Never use a taxi.

No matter how late it is. No matter how well known the destination. Never ever use a Taxi. The driver does not know the way. The only qualifications you need to become a taxi driver in Tokyo are:

1) a short back and sides.
2) a pair of spotless white gloves
3) a passenger door that opens automatically.
4) possibly a driving licence.

Taxi drivers in Tokyo, in general, have absolutely no idea where they are going. Unless you can direct the taxi from the place you entered the cab to the place you want to go - you are stuffed. The double edged sort is that whilst taxi drivers have no idea where anything is, they will be to embarrassed to admit it. So when you ask the driver to be taken to the well known central location he will say “Hi Hi” (trans: yep no problem climb in) withouth alerting you to the fact that he is already lost.

After approximately 5 minutes the chin stroking will begin. He will ask you to repeat the destination. Alarm bells will start to ring - but not loudly enough for you to say “stop I am getting out”.

After 10 minutes of pretending that he knows how his Sat Nav device works you realise it is just for show as he hands you a street map of Tokyo along with a magnifying glass so large that it makes you wonder if he is avoiding other vehicles by using “the force.”

After 15 minutes he will phone a friend and then another friend but to no avail - none of them know where Mark City in Shibuya is either. Then the penny drops - all his other friends are taxi drivers too.

After 20 minutes he will stop the car, get out and try to ask people in the street while the meter keeps on ticking. This is a pointless exercise because of tip number two.

Tip number two. Don’t ask a stranger for directions.

Why not? In the short time I was there I learned to say it in Japanese. “XXXXX doco desuka?” - so what’s the problem?

The problem is that unless the place you are looking for happens to be the place where the stranger lives or works - they are unlikely to know the answer. In my brief glimpse into the Japanese way I got the destinct impression that people in general don’t really get too involved in anything outside of their specific area of interest. And that most probably excludes the place you want to visit.

Now this might seem a little stereotypical - but try it and see. Go to a part of Tokyo - lets say Shibuya - and ask which direction you need to walk in to get to Shinjuku. In my unscientific estimation there is a 95% chance that your stranger will not know the answer. It is, however, a 100% certainty that they will be too embarrassed to admit this and will point in a random direction - hoping the you will just go away and stop making them feel so uncomfortable. If you ask four strangers it is entirely possible, within the space of a few minutes, to get different 4 people to point to the four different corners of the earth.

More golden Tokyo tips tomorrow.

Ok.. things have been a bit sketchy of late - Unazukin got confiscated by AG and to be fair that was the lightest punishment i could have possibly received. After all - at almost a moments notice - i upped and went to Japan and stayed with a random girl who emailed me via the site. The Vaio blowing up was probably kharma for my selfish decision. I say my decision - although as always I did put the question to Unazukin and.. anyway i’m getting a little bit ahead of myself.

A while back I got an email from a girl called Akiko (or Akichan to her friends). She told me that she was a huge Unazukin fan and told me that if I was ever in Tokyo I should pop by her Unazukin themed cafe for an ice cream. I wrote back saying that Tokyo is top of my list of “must visits” but that it’s a little bit out of my price range. We corresponded for a while and it turned out that any friend of Unazukin is a friend of hers and if I could get the flight - she would sort me out with somewhere to stay. No funny business like - just a place to crash.

I casually checked the prices of flights. I wasn’t seriously entertaining the notion, but was surprised to see that Air France were doing a special for £400 quid.. Now with my accomodation sorted - that is no more expensive than a week away in a B+B in Torquay (and probably cheaper than a trip to Scotland if my previous journey was any kind of indication). Given that I work freelance, I figured could probably still work on the plane and in Tokyo whilst enjoying the city in my down time (thanks again Sony).

I consulted Una and given that she would be going with me at no extra charge - she jumped at the chance to visit her homeland. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with AG. I thought of loads of different ways of trying to dress it up - but there was no reasonable way to say “A random girl wants me to visit her on the other side of the world and I have consulted my toy who says that i have to”. So I just came out with it.

She wasn’t thrilled but to be honest she knows me well enough to know that when I want to do something I cannot be talked out of it. I don’t mean to say that in a way that makes me come across as a “mans man who knows his own mind and does what he wants when he wants” sort of guy. I’m not. I’m not proud of being so stubborn but there is something mildly obsessive compulsive about my make up that eats away at me if I am not doing something that I have set out to do. Really, I get quite odd about it. Not quite rocking backwards and forwards muttering.. but not a million miles from that either.

So Japan then.

I’ll be brief about the place in general. A million people have probably been there, had a proper look round and explained it better than I ever could. I on the otherhand spent most of my time trying to buy and fit a new hard drive into this erratic laptop. My work got behind and i’m still catching up - this combined with the confiscation of Una are the two main reasons for my equally erratic blogging.

Akichan was a lot of fun. Her cafe (if I were to be a little more accurate i’d probably call it a booth or stand - probably got lost in translation) is in Nakano district and is very cute. It is resplendant with it’s Unazukin banners and Unazukin cutouts surrounded by fairly lights riding in a wheelbarrow being pulled by a squid on top of it all. It sold what we would probably term as an eclectic mix of delicious foodstuffs. The three main items where Ice Cream, Crepes (french style) and Squid balls (balls of squid - it wasnt that odd)

What do you know - i have a pic..

And let’s just see a close up of the Squid nonchalantly pulling a wheelbarrow filled with fairylit Unazukins..

The crepes and ice cream are amazing. God alone knows how the good people of Nakano stay so damned thin. Nakano is an interesting place - the jewel in its crown for sat Otaku’s like me has to be Nakano Broadway which has an infinite number of comic and toy stores. I was hoping they might have rare limited edition Unazukins there (although buying one would have put my Una’s nose out of joint) but the toys in Nakano Broadway were, in general, of the more adult variety. Granted, some of them were fairies but they were a little more anatomically correct. Well correct for somebody who has had some serious breast augmentation.

So as I said at the start of this ramble, Una was taken from me on arrival into the UK. Not by customs and excise attmepting to see if i had tried to exceed my allocation of school girl underwear by trying to force a used gymslip inside of Una’s delicate shell. She was confiscated by an angry AG who gets annoyed enough by my bizarre life choices without having a plastic scapegoat to pin the blame on.

Oh my god. I’m finally able to get back and use my blog.. I’ve been out of action for two completely seperate reasons - both of which the blame rests firmly at the door of Japan.

The first reason is that the fifth and last ever Sony Vaio that i will ever buy - totalled itself. Again. I am now on my 3rd hard drive this year as this Vaio attempts to beat my last one to claim the coveted “Shortest Life Span of any PC owned by Me Award”. I thought that last years Vaio that managed to stop working completely after just a year was a temporary blip but it looks like it is the continuation of a downward spiral in build quality that has this time resulted in me losing all my data twice in just over 6 months. Anyway - it has took me ages to get every thing back on its feet. It wouldn’t have taken so long if it were not for Japan dealing a much kinder but never the less devastating blow to my blogductivity. I will tell you more later in this post.

First the soup. Oddly enough it was whilst editing this short video that my laptop bluescreened and welcomed me back with the now familiar message “Operating system not found”…

As explained in my last post - I took Unazukin to our local Asda and then into the tinned food isle. I allowed her free reign to pick 5 ingredients with which to create an entirely original soup to be named in her honour. Below follows a ground breaking recipe that is set to change the way that the world looks at cuisine.

Unazukin soup

1 tin Marrowfat peas
1 tin peaches (in syrup)
1 tin mushrooms (creamed)
1 tin Tellytubby spaghetti (Thomas the Tank engine will do if you can’t get Tellytubby)
Sardines (tinned)
2 tsp chopped parsley

Place the ingredients into a pan, stir and then blitz with a hand mixer. Heat gently until it starts to boil and remove from heat. Ladle into bowl. Sprinkle chopped parsley. Enjoy.

The video recipe can be seen here.

Why doesn’t it show me eating it? Because it stank. I was retching as I was stirring it and the noxious scent wafted from out of the pan. I had planned on eating it but it really made me gag.. Sorry. But I’m no stuntman.

Anyway - the second reason that Japan has been lowering my productivity on all things blog based? I’ve just spend the last few weeks there. I received a mail from an Unazukin obsessive who claimed to have an Unazukin themed bar and invited me to come and stay. It seemed like a bit of an oddly generous thing to do but then who knows maybe she asked her Unazukin (probably as the option that she didnt want to take) and it told her to do it. Some sort of bizarre universal Unazukin conciousness, that I have aluded to before, is what probably told my Una to advise me to accept..

Nothing for ages and then two come at once.. I’ve been busy of late but this awesome little advert prompted me back into action.

I’m assuming that it came from Japan. It certainly came from a Japanese person who must have captured it off the telly. If only our telly in the UK was a cute and cuddly as this.. The thing I like best is the tune - this could be the most annoying yet compulsive tune of all time. Move over “The Birdy Song” as the Unazukin song has arrived. Watch it twice and see if you don’t spend the rest of the day humming it. In fact why not go mad and learn the words too. I have attempted to translate the lyrics based on absolutely no knowledge of Japanese and as far as i can work out they are:

“Unazukin evil Unazukin.. She is Be-al-ze-bub
Unazukin scarey Unazukin.. She’ll eat your kids alive”

if anyone knows better then please feel free to comment:

The next post will be following shortly. The advert invigorated me enough to attempt another Unazukin experiment. After successfully inventing an Unazukin cocktail - I decided to make some Unazukin soup. Again I dragged Una around a supermarket and allowed her to chose ingredients. Not M+S this time either i’m afraid. I thought I would attempt a budget soup for all the students and fellow designers that might be reading this. So I allowed Una to compile the ingredients by choosing them from the tinned fruit and veg isle at my local Asda. You are probably wondering if it possible to make a gourmet soup that way. I will know later on tonight. Although my instinct tells me that any soup containing both tinned ham and peaches is likely to have limited appeal.

Ok - just to recap. I took Unazukin into Marks and Spencers and allowed her to choose random ingredients which would be mixed in order to create an official Unazukin cocktail. As expected she chose some odd things. Specifically the yoghurt smoothie reacted with the fizzy mango juice and curdled in a pretty unappetizing manner. Since it is a cocktail I took the liberty of adding a pretty liberal splash of vodka.

It took a little longer to edit and upload than i thought but here it is.. Without further a do, I give you the cocktail that I am calling “The Un-digestion”

How did it taste? Well you know how when you mix paints and you put say, yellow with blue - you get green. And then you add a little yellow - you get a vibrant lime colour. And then you add red and suddenly you start to get a muddy brown colour that from now on is just brown no matter what you add to it. Well this drink was like that. It tasted of everything and nothing. And the yoghurt and fizzy mango juice gave it the textural appeal of a pint of month old milk that had been left in the sun.

I don’t normally go to M+S - I can’t really afford it. But they have the most bizarre range of soft drinks there and I figured that in order to invent a cocktail that had never been invented before - it would be simplest of all just to choose from some unlikely ingredients.

I walked over to the chiller cabinet and subtley asked Unazukin to start choosing our ingredients. There are plenty of places in my home town where nobody would bat an eye to a thirtysomething male consulting an eggshaped toy on what to drink. M+S isn’t one of them.

Working from top left to bottom right, I would point to a drink and repeat the words “this one” as quietly as I could - but loud enough for Unazukin to hear and respond. I won’t lie to you - I did get some odd looks. But somehow the fact that I was wearing sunglasses somehow made me feel a little less vulnerable and I managed to brave it out.

I carried my haul over to the counter. I was served by a hugely overweight Spanish girl. I thought that it was a little bit unfair that M+S made her wear a t-shirt with the tagline “Simply Food” emblasoned across the front - it almost looked as if it was there in order to pre-empt any questions about her impressively large frame. It reminded me of the few occasions that i’ve been into Macdonalds and seen their crew of spotty teenagers earning minumum wage serving thrombosis to chavs. They scurry around sweating and frying their miserable lives away whilst being forced to wear a badge proclaiming “I’m Loving it”. You have to admire Ronalds twisted sense of humour. Anyway I digress..

The drinks that Unazukin chose were as follows:

Still water blended with natural strawberry and guava flavour.
Apple, melon, strawberry and Kiwi “fruit in a bottle”
Apple and Kiwi “fruit in a bottle”*
Diet sparkling Alphonso Mango and Passionfruit
Vanilla bean yoghurt smoothie**

* this seems like a strange choice to me as it pretty much replicated the one before it - however Unazukin chose both and I have to go with her superior brain.

** i’m no cocktail expert but my initual instincts tell me that yoghurt and fizzy drinks are possibly a bad combination.

I am off to mix this cocktail now and will report back with my findings.

Meanwhile entertain yourself with these awesome additions to the Unazukin battle from the awsome talent of DeViL - somebody give this guy a job if he doesn’t have one already!

Nice to see a good old fashioned Goatse amongst that lot - Mr DeViL, I take my hat off to you sir. You are truely old skool.

Ok. I’ve been away. Sorry i’ve left you hanging and for anyone that was worried that this toy had got me killed - worry no more. At least you had the cute game to keep you occupied - btw if you want to play it again it can now be found in the stuff section of the site. The beauty of letting a toy decide your destiny (and being able to book last minute holidays online, without thinking through the consequences and after a night on the beer) meant that me and AG just had a two week holiday in Svoronata on the Greek Island of Kefalonia. I didn’t have time to blog about it before we left as it was a mission to get everything sorted in time - including getting the holiday from work (very unimpressed about it) and convinding AG that I was just spontanious rather than mental.

The place we went to was nice -and considering the price we paid the holiday was a steal. The hotel was brand new and they reckoned that they’d not been sure if it was going to be ready in time and so hadn’t been able to take booking until very late.

Whilst i was away there have been some awesome additions to the Unazukn Battle. This dark little offering is from Gavin Palmer and shows what many believe to be the real face of the Unazukin.

Fellow Unazukin obsessives and innocent onlookers. Today we have mined a rich seam of japanese gold and have hit the Unzazukin motherload.. check out this bizarre little game that Danny-san sent us. He found it on a japanese site and i and it’s just too good to resist “borrowing”.. The instructions are written below:

Ok, it’s pretty simple. Click on the flashing japanese text to begin. It looks like Unazukin is trying to have a picnic and is being bothered by insects. Your primary directive is to protect the food. Do not let the insects eat the food. In order to kill the insects you have to drag them towards the bigger creatures in the corners which will devour them whole. If the insect flies - drag it over to the space in front of the frog. If it crawls then drag it to the evil spider.

As you progress - the flies and bugs are “upgraded” to snails and wasps (as you might expect..) Good luck - if you can get past level 6 you are a better man than I.

Oh and the most important instruction of all.. the sound off button is the square thing in the bottom right corner

In other news - we’ve had a tasty manga style Unazukin submitted to the Unazukin Battle. He/she didn’t leave a name and will be known only as anonymous..

c’mon people - don’t be shy about leaving your names - it’s not like you have to leave an email address and so I couldn’t bombard you with emails about increasing the size of your genitalia even if i wanted to. (which for the record I don’t!). Plus budding artists have the option of linking to their webpage - so that any visitor who falls in love with your work and wants to find out more - can!

Meanwhile - my mission to let Unazukin dictate my life has dried up in the last few days. My revised mission has been to wait until I am asked to do something that I don’t want to - and then let Unazukin choose between that and something more interesting. For the last few days AG has been away and therefore I have been lacking my chief catalyst. With nobody to ask me to do stuff, I have had no opportunity to consult Una. With no AG to nag me my slothful nature has dictated that I have done nothing at home apart from eat and sit on my every expansive arse. Today I walked into the kitchen and nearly gagged at the stench coming from the sink as 3 days worth of washing up has started to react with the hot weather.

I decided that it was time to sort it out. Or at least consult Unazukin as to wether I should attempt the washing up, or sit on my backside playing on my Xbox 360. Unfortunately for my neighbours and the local health authority - Unazukin went for the Xbox route.

My kitchen will continue like this for another day.

Yesterday Unazukin finally came of age. She was actually useful - or would have been if things had turned out differently.

I have been going about this all wrong by trying to force her to make a decision during some point of my day as this has always felt a little unnatural and even cumbersome. The Unazukin decision has been something that I have had to try and work into my life - but things have now changed for the better. When I say better I suppose I mean that I have found a way for her to make my life easier.

This might be cheating a little on my original intentions, but it is my experiment and I will do whatever feels good for me. Since the relevation that I have to let Unazukin choose between one thing I do want to do and one thing that I don’t, it has occured to me how I can use this to my advantage. I can almost play Unazukin as my “get out of jail free card”. If there is a time during the day that I have to do something that I don’t want to do, I can simply think of something that i’d really like to do and ask Unazukin to choose between them.

In some respects this is a bit win/win as if I would have normally have had to do the thing I don’t want to do already. I realise this is kind of against the whole spirit of the project and will probably bring me into conflict with AG a bit more often. But at heart I am a very lazy person and if I can somehow invoke Unazukin to justify this then I am a happy man.

Yesterday however she sent me on a wild goose chase. First though have a butchers at my new favourite addition to the Unazukin Battle which was uploaded yesterday by Morbid Angel.

I was walking past the church on the main road near my house. The church itself is true to its Christian beliefs in that it welcomes allcomers into its sanctuary. I do think that this hospitality is somewhat abused by the large group of tramps that sit outside the place day and night drinking budget high strength lagers and contemplating the meaning of life with each other - loudly whilst thinking through a fog of alcohol. Whilst walking past I was approached by a women (i think) aged somewhere between 35 and 70 years old. She had three teeth and a complexion that Simon Weston would have shyed away from.

She stared me full in the face, her eyes slowly closing and opening whilst her head nodded up and down slightly as if she was trying to fight off jetlag. She beckoned me closer by waggling her index finger - although I was pretty sure that I was as close as I needed to be.

“Have you got any string?” she mumbled.

“What?” I queried “actually on me now?”

“Have YOU got any STRING?” she repeated emphasising the two salient parts of the question, in case for some reason the concept was too mighty for me to grasp.

“I don’t actually have any one me now” I replied.

“Why not?” she slurred.

“Well” i said hoping that she would see my point of view “Do you have have any string with you?”. She grimaced and turned her nose up as if some foul smell (apart from her own overwhelming funk) had suddenly filled her nostrils. She thought about the situation for a moment or two as she swayed from side to side. I could see the paradox of the point I was making working its way around her scrumpy addled brain. After a full 15 seconds of weighing up the situation, she spoke.

“HAVE YOU GOY ANY STRING” she bellowed.

At this point I decided to consult Unazukin and pulled her from my bag. I switched her on and held her in my outstretched hand. I think the fact that I didn’t feel at all uncomfortable about talking to a childs toy in public says less about my new found confidence in Unazukin and more about the general mental state of the people in my immidiate vicinity. The fact that it was completely ignored by these alcohol induced mentalists shows just what kind of level of insanity they have acheived.

I asked Unazukin whether I should (a) go try and find some string for the gin soaked hag or (b) go and buy a bottle of gin for myself and treat AG and I to some cool G+T’s in the sunshine and write the rest of the day off..

Unfortunately it seems Unazukin has a charitable nature and advised me that the crusty old soaks need was greater than mine. So I spent half an hour wandering around the local shops trying to buy the simplest of items. String. It used to be everywhere but all the shop assistants I spoke to looked at me like I was asking for a victorian clothes mangle. As I searched I became more and more intrigued at what my pie-eyed friend actually wanted it for. I have noticed that it seems to be the fashion amongst the street drinking brew crew to use it as a make shift belt - and wondered if in fact she had forgotten hers and was feeling embarrassingly under-dressed. Eventually I managed to find an old school haberdashery that i’d never noticed before and lo and behold they had a nice big ball of string.

When I arrived back at the church, string women was still standing (sort of) where I left her. As I approached her, she slowly focussed on me. I was disappointed that she showed no sense of recognition when my face finally reformed itself for her.

“Have you got any string?” she said.

“As a matter of fact I have” I replied triumphantly “i’ve got a whole ball of the stuff so prepare to fill your boots”. In fairness she probably already had and probably filled them on regular occasions. I removed the ball of string from by bag and held it in front of her face - allowing plenty of time for her eyes to refocus. She stared blankly at the brand new ball of string and then screwed up her face in the traditional “bulldog chewing a wasp” fashion.

“HAVE YOU GOT ANY STRING?” she yelled. I placed the ball of twine at her feet, said my goodbyes and walked away briskly.