Mar 06, 2025
Guests:
K, M, S, J, A
Discussion Content:
S and A arrived first. A had not come to the salon for a long time as she had been busy with her Izakaya (Japanese-style pub).
K and M arrived soon after, and K had bought some vegetables from the unmanned stall in front of the Indian restaurant. She said it was only 100 yen. When I asked how much it would normally be at a supermarket she and A agreed it would be about 190 yen.
I wondered if the Indian restaurant makes any money from the sales, but K guessed that they probably do not, and just do it as a service for a farmer – perhaps a friend that they know.
I asked if anyone had ever gone to the “Direct Farm Sales” shop that I have often seen but never entered. K said she has and that it’s very good – especially around May when baby tomatoes are in season. She said she went almost every day.
I said that my wife and I hesitate to enter small shops where you can’t see from the outside what’s for sale, because if there’s nothing we want, then it feels rude to just leave suddenly without buying anything – especially because the owner is usually right there watching you.
Just then, J arrived, and the room seemed to start vibrating like in an earthquake. “What’s that noise?!”, I asked, and J said “It’s a chopper”, meaning a helicopter. (Helicopters are sometimes referred to as “choppers” – probably because the blades of the rotors chop through the air like a chopping knife).
I wondered how J knew the word “chopper”, and he explained that in the USA he went to record the various sounds made by Blackhawk helicopters, and had a turn trying a flight simulator, and even firing a real AK-47 rifle.
This was perfect timing, because today I had brought two short videos I had taped off the TV to show the group:
In a previous salon, we talked about how in Japan a stapler is called a “Hotchkiss” because this was the name of a company who manufactured them. The first video I brought, was of a documentary on WW1 showing a machine-gun manufactured by a company called “Hotchkiss”. This made me wonder if the same company later went on to make staplers, so I asked the group to look up on Google when staplers were first invented. A looked it up on her phone, and J read the result in Japanese, but it only talked about staplers first being imported into Japan in 1903 – which was ten years before WW1 – so this didn’t tell us which came first, the machine-gun or the stapler.
(*Now, having looked it up afterwards, the truth seems impossible to determine. Even though the coincidence would be enormous – that, not only were there two completely separate people named Hotchkiss, but that one of them manufactured staplers and the other manufactured machine-guns, two devices which have a very similar process of firing off pieces of metal one-by-one – there is no clear, direct evidence that links the two people or the two manufacturing processes.)
The 2nd video clip I brought, was from a documentary about a man wanted by the Japanese police for 50 years for bombing the Mitsubishi building in 1974. His wanted poster was well known all over Japan, and my wife said every Japanese person would know that face, so I brought it to ask the salon members.
The only reason he was eventually discovered, was because he decided to confess while in a hospital, knowing he was about to die soon. So amazingly, he had spent the past 50 years on the run from the law, using a different name, living in a run-down apartment, and forced to do only cash-in-hand manual labor jobs. My wife said he probably would have had a better life in jail.
This led me to ask the group if they knew what conditions were like in Japanese jails, and whether they are very strict and severe, or rather easy like jails in Scandinavian countries. As a joke, someone said “Probably none of us have ever been in jail”, but surprisingly, J said that he had actually seen inside a Japanese jail. He once performed inside a jail as a musician supporting an Enka singer who went there to entertain the prisoners.
Useful phrases:
in season
vibrating
a chopper (meaning a helicopter)
rotor
stapler
machine-gun
wanted by police
a wanted poster
on the run (from the law)
a “cash-in-hand” job
jail/prison
a prisoner