Big In Japan

Y5000 is, yes, W50 000 and you'll need one of these notes and another Y1000 for your Visa stamp. I didn't buy this Japan Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet actually offered me any Lonely Planet Guidebook in return for some free info I provided them on Korea (and maybe also the Philippines). I chose Japan since I thought it is the country I was most likely to visit, and I already had guidebooks for Malaysia and the Philippines.

This guidebook though provided virtually no help on getting around in Osaka, but then a Visa run is a pretty damn specific thing, and probably not someone who is travelling to Japan will do. Why would anyone travel to Japan just for the sake of getting a Visa for somewhere else, and even more ridiculous, a visa for the country they've just come from? I think though, they might aswell put a column, or box some text, to deal with this unique and extremely wasteful activity. To send thousands of teachers here (there are 444 000* foreigners living in Korea, a large proportion of which are teachers, about 20 000 or less are military) for a slip of paper is a disgusting waste of resources and is one of the things our grandchildren will be told in their beds and say, "You people were so stupid then. No wonder we got into trouble and ran out of everything."

*I didn't pull this number out of a hat. The Korea Times that I bought yesterday quoted exactly this, seemingly magic, number. In Korea though, 4 when written as you see it here, is their character for death. In many elevators and other places, the number '4' is replaced with an F. We westerners are perhaps equally suspicious of the number 13. When you realise how arbitrary a lot of our thinking is, in terms of suspicions and habits, you realise how peculiar the human animal is. Our most peculiar trait is our collective ability to believe that what we do, and how we are, is natural. Natural is another word, I believe, for healthy, and none of us are very healthy in how we live, and if we are, it is only achieved at a great deal of inconvenience.

The world is designed to be convenient towards a lot of unnatural ends. Have you ever tried to be a vegetarian? Ever heard of Vegetarian Fast Food? There's a pervasive perversity to that, but of course the heart and soul of this is driven by greed and the demand for more, whatever the long term cost to the world and ourselves. Is that natural? Nature seems to have an even and steady (sustainable) pace, even when it moves fast. Our pace is ever quickening, and obsessed with speed. Re: globalisation, traffic jams, bottlenecks, fast food, hyper speed internet, next day around the world couriers with their own fleets of boeings, deadlines (not lifelines), terminals (sounds like a place to wait and die), tickets (slang for death or the end), heart attacks and subway sandwiches.