I just had my birthday about a week ago. For my birthday, I got wonderful gifts. It’s always great to have friends and family who think of you. Of many gifts I got, I found that pigs are popular in the relaxation goods in these days. As the picture indicates, I got a few relaxation bath goods. Of four kinds, two of them are characters of pigs. Are pigs becoming popular???

With yummy smelling Brazilian soap and bath-salts from various well-known Onsen (hot spring) of Hokkaido, I got two pigs! One is a pig body sponge and another is a big ashitsubo (foot therapeutic point) massager. My friend who got two of these gifts in the picture told me that when she went looking for gifts for my birthday and other friends, she somehow found herself picking up pig-character goods quite often.

Is this the time to relax with pigs??

You probably made mud balls when you were a kid. I did and it was fun to make it smoother and harder. But did you know you can make it shiny? I was surprised to read this site. Look! It’s so shiny. Actually it seems a real hobby in Japan and there is the "Association of Nippon Doroｰdango Science" (Doro-dango is mud ball in Japanese). Here is the site talking about shiny mubball in English. This site has instructions  for"how to make shiny mudball". Wow don’t you think you want to try? I want. I will :-)

Yesterday I read an interesting article. The products having good sales have common keyword. It’s "Men’s". For example, Kanebo foods released a gum "men flavor" (otoko kaoru). After eating the gum, your body smell like a rose, they said. It flied out of stores and currently they are back-ordered.  "The Handsome Tofu" (Otokomae Dofu) was the big topic because of their success. They are just Tofu maker, but they have very unique pop website and named a very tough manish name to each tofu. This is "handsome tofe", this is "Blown by the wind, tofu guy Johnny" tofu.  This summer, the authentic umbrella maker Miyatake released guy’s parasol "Men’s Sara cool". They said Sara cool sold more than women’s parasol this year. Thinking of "men’s", I think Glico men’s pocky is the first product having copy "men’s".

Hmm interesting, I wonder "men’s" sound "functionable", "real", "serious" to the people. I tried only that gum, did my body smell nice? No I didn’t feel like that.

I have been away (and without Internet access) for the past 10 days in Tochigi Prefecture. While there I heard about Georgia’s Max Coffee. It’s been sold for a long time, but it was the first time I had ever heard people getting excited over can coffee.

Georgia’s Max Coffee is sold only in Chiba, Ibaraki and Tochigi. I never knew that, much to a amusement of my Japanese coworkers (who were buying up big at every chance they got). The coffee is sweet and that’s about it, but it seems to be very popular with people selling it on net auctions and driving from Tokyo to Chiba etc just to buy Max Coffee!!!

Can’t understand why they don’t release it in Tokyo, but the limited area of distribution seems to be working as a marketing ploy!!

Gone too far?? I am inclined to think so… but then, what do I know? I value your opinion more… what do you think?

The other weekend when I was walking a back street route from Akihabara to Ueno I happened across this “maid hairdressers”… I wish I knew more about it… am I paying a lot more to have my haircut by a stylist in a maids uniform? Has anyone out there ever been?

Via kungfootv’s flickr photostream

iPods on sale at the local combini (how they call convenience stores here in Japan). Well, this is something I can get used to: