I just heard that my poor dad tripped on the pavement while running for the bus and knocked his two front teeth out. I do hope he gets well soon. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty to cheer him up:
If you can’t view the video, watch it here on YouTube.
Update: My dad’s got a new set of pearly whites, and my mum wrote an entertaining poem about the whole expeirence here: His Pocket Hurts
I’m still reading through books on influence and persuasion, and in particular, how companies sucker consumers into buying their latest products. Here’s a tip I learned that I’d like to share with parents who might soon be asking what their children want for Christmas.
Christmas sales and the after-shock
The run up to Christmas is booming business for toy stores, but what happens in the couple of months after they make their record profits? January and February should be the most dismal time of the year for toy stores, right?
Wrong. Here’s the scam:
In the weeks before Christmas, toy stores and manufacturers ramp up their advertising, enticing children to beg their parents for the latest and greatest wonder toy. Parents usually give in and promise their children they’ll buy them that toy for Christmas.
However, toy stores want to maximize profits so they deliberately “run out of stock” of the most wanted items. Instead, they order extra toys of a similar value so parents have no choice but to buy the alternative toys as Christmas presents.
Then, during January and February, they focus their advertising campaigns on the previously out of stock toy, so that the children are once again begging for that toy that their parents promised them for Christmas!
So be warned. Don’t make any promises!
It’s late afternoon on Christmas Day 2007, and Ricky is having a nap as I write this. Our son has just turned five months old and woke up this morning to his first Christmas. Unlike the rest of Japan, we are fortunate not to have work or school today so are making the most of it.
Santa Claus got in through the front door
Japanese houses don’t have chimneys, but last night Santa must have come in through the front door because my wife spotted him delivering presents and placing them under the Christmas tree.
I didn’t believe her, but not only did we have more presents, he had cheekily taken a photo of himself with my own camera!
Rikuto sits up by himself for the first time
The video below, or here on Youtube, shows Rikuto trying to sit up by himself. This is the first time he has had any real success at sitting up, and although he still needs some practice, it’s clear he’ll be doing it with ease very soon. Also in the video, you can see Ricky and me play with one of his Christmas presents from Santa.
Merry Christmas everybody!
I’m going to stop blogging for the rest of the day and go and do what us Brits do best – eat chocolate and drink beer. Tonight we’re going to log back on and make a Christmas toast over the webcam with my family in England, open some more presents and maybe watch a Christmas video if Rikuto will let us. Okay then, Merry Christmas everybody! Enjoy your day!
There are a few things I’d like to ramble about this morning (2:30am!).
The word “Half” – to allow it or not
Mami and I were talking about what to tell Rikuto about the word, “half”. If you missed my post, Half-Japanese or Half-Blood?, this English word is used by Japanese people to describe someone who is only part Japanese. Foreigners despise this word because the English implications are not complete, impure, or even polluted.
The problem is that Japanese people have absolutely no idea we see it as a derogatory term, and say things like “Ah, isn’t he cute? Is he a half?” or “You’re so lucky to have a half!”. How should we respond to these kind of comments? And at what age should we teach Rikuto that it’s wrong for people to refer to him as “half”?
Mami is worried that if I jump on everyone that describes him that way, he’ll learn from me that it’s derogatory, and lose all self-confidence when he hears everyone using that term to describe him! I can understand what Mami is getting at. She wants to protect him until he’s old enough to understand an explanation. Fortunately, we’ve still got a long time to think this one through.
Google’s war on paid links
Mike lost his PageRank and Jason was finally spanked by Google this week, and I’ve been scrambling to make my websites compliant with Google’s new policies on paid linking so the same thing doesn’t happen to me. Most of you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, but basically Google is punishing people who sell text link advertising. Mike, Jason and I all wrote sponsored posts and got paid to do so, but now Google has outlawed that practice, at least if you still want people to find your blog in Google’s search results. The reason for this “shock and awe” phase of Google’s ”war on paid links” is that it’s possible to manipulate their search results by buying text advertising and using words you expect people to search for to find your site.
LongCountdown.com penalized by Google anyway
I still have my “PageRank” for the time being, but Google has penalized me for something else which I’ve yet to identify. If you search for my name right now, you’re unlikely to find me on the first page of Google’s search results. In fact, you might have to go as far as page three to find LongCountdown.com. This fall from number three to page three isn’t what bothers me, though. The real kicker is that my Writing Wizard website sits in a subdomain of this blog, and that means my most profitable website has also been pushed off the front page of Google’s search results.
If it’s broke, fix it
The bright side to all this is that while I try to figure out what change I need to make to this blog to “reactivate” it in Google, I’m learning a few things about “bad neighbourhoods” and other factors that can topple a site from it’s perch. I’m quite confident I’ll have things back to normal within a month. Fortunately, my other sites are holding up well and still putting money in my pocket while I ride this out. Update: Within 48 hours, I was back ranking where I should be. I did this by ensuring I was in compliance with Google Webmaster Guidelines, finding questionable links with the bad neighborhood tool and then removing them, and finally submitting a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster Tools.
Two weeks Christmas holidays coming up
I only realized the other day that I have nothing to do during this year’s festive holidays! Whoo-hoo! It’s the longest holiday of the year for me, but I usually find myself busy with something. Last year we moved house; the year before that we went to England on our belated honeymoon, and previous Christmases have had me developing school curriculum! This year, besides doing all I can to appease Google, I have nothing to do but play with Rikuto! I’ll probably set up a playroom for him in a spare room, somewhere he can safely run around and bump into things – once he discovers he has legs, of course.
Spending Christmas Day with my family in England
This year will be the first time we can really put our web camera to good use. Rikuto’s grandparents in England finally got broadband last month and that means we’ll be sitting around having drinks together, and opening presents with them through the internet!
Walking around the shops the other day, I saw that Christmas goods are already for sale - in mid-October, in a country that doesn’t even celebrate Christmas (they celebrate Kentucky Fried Chicken instead).
It’s not really a surprise to see the biggest commercial festival of the year starting well before the event itself, but I am surprised to see all the Christmas cards…
With a tradition of New Year’s post cards (nengajou), sending greetings cards like we do back home isn’t common practice in Japan. That’s not to say they don’t exist, but they’ve usually been limited in number and lacking in creativity. This year however, I’ve seen a whole new approach to Christmas cards in Japan. Instead of just a Santa Claus or a Christmas tree on the front, the Japanese-style (wa-fuu) Christmas card blends the bright red colour of Santa’s bottoms with traditional Japan.
You’ve got a bout of sumo, watched by hundreds of little Santas, then there’s Santa and his reindeer flying over Kyoto’s Kiyomizu temple, and more red-coated, bearded people enjoying Christmas at the Golden Pavillion (Kinkakuji). These little red gift-givers also pop up in pop-up cards! And those are just the Christmas cards I bought, just a small sample of the many Japanese-style Christmas cards available.
Update: It looks like the company responsible for these “mini-Santa” cards is Greeting Life, Inc.
This last week has been pretty hectic. The weekend was dominated by Christmas parties with my school’s children’s party on Saturday, another school’s party on Sunday morning, and a party for my adult students on Sunday night.
The first party was a bit crazy. There were about 45 kids and we played all kinds of games including pass the parcel, cake walk, Christmas fruit basket and bingo, and managed to find time for some food and drinks, too. The two highlights were the boy who downed four cups of soda and threw up on the floor, and the seemingly drunk Santa Claus who belched in to the microphone and told the kids his favorite food was reindeer meat! Since ‘Santa’ might be reading this, I better assure you that he wasn’t really drunk… he was just having a little too much fun.
The second party the next morning was relatively problem free with the staff doing a great job. Most of the 50 kids were younger than those the previous day and seemed to get into the silliness of it all much better. I tell you, most of my kids are just too ‘cool’ to have fun, but these little guys had a great time. Santa behaved himself too, so the children went home with their dreams intact.
The adult party was a much smaller affair with about a dozen of my students coming out to the Italian Asian (?) restaurant I had reserved. There were a great mix of personalities and fun was had by all. We went to town on the bingo prizes with something for everyone, and most of the prizes cost more than the price of the party itself! Since I was drinking, I crashed on the school floor, only to wake up at about 5am freezing my goolies off.
When I first came to Japan, I was told that Kentucky Fried Chicken, or simply ‘Kentucky’ as it’s known in Japan, is a Christmas tradition. I was told that people flock to KFC for their annual Christmas Eve dinner. I didn’t really take it seriously until I saw people lining up for three blocks one Christmas Eve, just to get their dose of chicken!
Although it exists, turkey isn’t common in Japan, and it certainly isn’t associated with Christmas. Colonel Saunders and his massive advertising campaigns have embedded “KFC = Christmas” into the minds of most naive Japanese. I say ‘naive’ because Christmas in Japan is purely commerical with no religious strings attached. Therefore everything the Japanese understand about Christmas has been fed to them through TV, radio and magazines, including commercials for chicken.
Maybe it’s because Colonel Saunders bears a resemblance to Santa Claus himself, and his statue outside every KFC is wearing a Santa suit. Or maybe the American occupation after the war is the reason for KFC’s success, that is assuming the Americans all ate chicken at Christmas due to the lack of turkey. I really have no idea… and neither do the Japanese.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:
KFC is so prevalent in Japan that many Japanese unknowingly consider it to be a Japanese Company. On Christmas day many families (who have made reservations weeks in advance), have their traditional Christmas dinner at KFC. Colonel Sanders has become somewhat of a cult figure in Japan. Not only is there a life-sized statue of the Colonel in front of every KFC, but his memorabilia like wind-up toys and figurines can be found at many toy stores throughout Japan.
Japanese baseball team Hanshin Tigers is thought to be under the Curse of the Colonel, a curse coming from when an enthusiastic fan threw a store-front statue of Colonel Sanders into a local canal during a celebration for the Tigers victory in the 1985 Japan Series. The curse says that the Tigers will not win again until the statue is recovered.
I thought that comment about the Hanshin Tigers was worth looking into elsewhere on the web and this is what I found on this Hanshin Tigers page:
The year 1985 is still fondly remembered by all Hanshin fans. Not only did the club win the Japan Series for the first (and so far only) time, but their first baseman Randy Bass won the Triple Crown award AND the Japan Series MVP award as well – in the process elevating himself to God-like status in the Kansai region.
When the Hanshin Tigers won the Japan Series in 1985, the fans went delirious. Among other things, they hijacked a train in Tokyo, and at Dotonbori, one of the entertainment districts in Osaka, people were jumping into the polluted river. The story goes that as the crowd yelled their way through the Hanshin roster, someone who looked like each of the players jumped into the river.
Apparently nobody looked like Randy Bass, so some bright spark thought the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders outside the local KFC would do. Well, he had a beard, he wasn’t Japanese…
Anyway, you can guess the rest – Colonel Sanders found himself at the bottom of the river.
The whereabouts of the Colonel remain a mystery to this day. They’ve even had divers down in the murky depths trying to find him, but to no avail. It is said that the Hanshin Tigers will never win again until he is found.
That page goes on to say the Tigers finally won the Central League pennant in 2003 but failed to win the Japan Series, so the curse supposedly continues.
As for Colonel Santa, erm, I mean Saunders, I guess I’ll be seeing him on Christmas Eve if I can reserve my chicken.
What’s that Mami? You’re kidding!? KFC is already fully booked?!
I guess we’ll be eating McDonald’s chicken nuggets for Christmas this year….
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