seldom asked questions...

while looking for a Tokyo subway map I came across this, which appears to be either a blog by people traveling/living in major cities, or a cleverly designed vehicle for ads for travelers, or both.

Here's the post that amused me (in its entirety, so you don't need to click the link & get the cookies yourself).

And about those porcelain statues with the giant testicles...

(yes, that was the title of the post)

There are a million questions we had about Japanese culture.

• Why do people slurp ramen?
  
• Who are the people on Japanese money?
  
• Why are there statues of racoon dogs* outside ramen shops and why do they always have giant testicles?
  
• When Japanese TV shows crime suspects, why are their handcuffs fuzzed out?
  
• Did the yogurt drink ‘Calpis’ get its name because it’s cow piss? (No.)
  
• And most importantly, why are there always Love Hotels near shrines?

The Japanese Seldom Asked Questions page answers all of these and more; amazing, really.

Japanese Seldom Asked Questions [Official Page]

On the same blog/site there's also a post about this story about how some relatives of Taiwanese men who were conscripted into the WWII Japanese army came to the Yasukuni Shrine (which honors war dead or something—it's associated with Japanese imperialism and until recently was very much frowned upon, but in keeping with the upsurge of fascism worldwide, its image has been a bit rehabilitated—ANYWAY!) to retrieve the souls of the conscripts and take them back to Taiwan. But a right-wing Japanese group wouldn't let them. So they went home without the souls.

Loopy was trying to tell me the other day that the culture probably isn't as different as I remember from an insecure age 15.

I actually think it might be more different, as I was a pretty oblivious kid in some ways.

But I'm happy to leave the jury out on that one til Loopy can decide for herself.

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*Raccoon dog??? I always thought these animals (tanuki in Japanese) were badgers.

But it turns out that this animal is native only to East Asia, so it's not a badger or racoon or dog, it's just a tanuki (stuffed one at left). They play a role in Japanese folk lore, sort of a gentle trickster (as opposed to the fox, the cruel trickster). More on tanukis here.

Which leads me to another question: why does so much folklore worldwide seem to have tricksters in it? I don't like these stories at all, but apparently that puts me out of touch with most of humanity through most of history.