I also remember having melon some time back. It was perfectly round and the size of my head .
The meat was so orange that it was nearly red. The best melon I’ve ever had. Set me back about 1000yen though.

It is my sixth year in Tokyo. Over the years, many people have asked me why I came and what I like about Japan (Tokyo). My usual answers are that I like the culture (it is quite different from the North American culture I grew up in), the weather (more sunny days than Vancouver), and the onsen. These are reasons that anyone can come up with. Tourists come to Tokyo for these same reasons. They are the right reasons but they are also boring reasons and do not give enough credit to the bustling and colourful megapolitan.

The Japanese way is a subtle one, and with six years under my belt, I have come to appreciate a bit of this way. Below are some less obvious reasons of why Tokyo is so great. Not everyone will agree with all the reasons — possibly only locals will nod and say “ahh….sou da ne”. At least they are not boring.

Trains and busses that are punctual, frequent, and covers most of the city

Quality onsen for under 2000yen.

Half-price sushi near closing time.

24-hour convenience stores within walking distance from home selling good oden, pasta, and sake.

100 yen stores that sell stuff that people actually need.

Free tissues hand-out.

Tatami floor in Izakaya’s.

Sakura in April.

Street musicians (some of them have more heart than talent, but some are quite good).

90 degree bows from the store staff after a purchase.

Takkyubin (Express couriers) that delivers up till 9pm.

Kimono on New Year’s, Yukata during fireworks.

and more, but that’s enough for one post. All the people say “ii ne”.

Well, I was wrong (happens more often than I’d like). WordPress stores multibyte text (you know, like 日本語) in the effective encoding at the time of posting, and when I just change my config and settings, the encoding of these text aren’t converted. That’s reasonable for WordPress, but doesn’t help me since now my pages look like I go into temporary insanity and scribble gibberish (ex. ¤ÎÀ¤³¦¤) every once in awhile.

To make matters worse, these text make some WordPress admin pages unusable since the gibberish interferes with the markup in the pages. The very pages I need to fix my problem are crippled !

As a last resort before reformatting my hard drive, which is the way I solve most of my PC problems, I decided to try to clean up the rebelling text in the database (MySQL).

My luck was unbelievable. It worked ! My harddrives sighed relief. My pages now look like they are written by a sane person. This anal author rejoices in the knowledge that his text are now safely stored and displayed to millions in SJIS.

Even customizing took little time. I admit it. Coming up with the title took the most time. Strange title for a Blog, but I’ll let it process itself out after a few more entries.