O-niku suki suki, O-niku suki suki...YEAH!

Music. I love it, you love it, we all love it. The Japanese of course take things a step further. Their desire for music or noise or stimulus of some kind appears to be more of a pathological need if the busy areas are anything to go by. Every time you step off a train you are greeted by a fanfare of happy jingly WELCOME! chimes - Kawasaki station in particular plays a loop of twittering birds over the stairs towards the ticketing gate.　　￥100 shops frequently have a little stereo outside, with blaring techno and a little lady shrieking "Irasshimase!" (please come in, be welcome or something like that). Such is the prevalance of random sources of music in central Kawasaki, I managed to pretty much completely miss a rather fierce Trance event, noticing it the third time I walked past it.

It doesn`t stop there. There`s a shopping street, a good mile away from the centre, with greengrocers, fishmongers, takoyaki stalls, green tea merchants & lamp-posts festooned with tiny tinny tannoys, belching forth the latest offerings from the glitter-spattered denizens of the J-Pop world...

...J-Pop is actually pretty nightmarish. They have a penchant for ballads. It wouldn`t be so bad if they were power ballads - at least then they`d be funny. No such luck. Mainstream J-Pop is a tapestry of saccharine horror. This country spawned The Boredoms? Actually, I`m not surprised, although nobody seems to have heard of them over here ("Boadomusu?" "Hai. Nihonjin desu." Baffled silence...), but this entry isn`t about J-Pop or Japanoise (I haven`t made that term up)...

...all the schools I`ve visited have the Chimes of Big Ben separating each period. The ring tone for Kyomachi`s telephones is "The Entertainer". Fujimi and Nakanoshima alternate between light chamber music & Celine Dion during their lunch hours, but it`s the shopping areas that seem to be the main source for constant muzak. The mini-supermarket I use has an advert on a semi-permanent loop for "O-niku". I knew the word before, but it`s only recently clicked in my mind what it actually means. It is a constant source of amusement for me that the chorus of chirpy, cheerful, hellishly cute Manga-heroines who shout "O-niku!" at the start of the jingle are actually shouting "MEAT!"

Finishing in the pop vein, and it seems that not even Japan is safe from the rampage of Katie Melua. Where`s Godzilla when you need him?