My brother-in-law and his girlfriend have been in town for the past week visiting us. We’ve been taking them all over Tokyo and the Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe) area, visiting shrines, temples, hot springs, and of course, shopping districts.

In the course of those shopping excursions, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend and I have noticed a fairly common product in cheap accessory stores — do-it-yourself piercing kits.

It’s essentially a cheap piece of plastic with a needle. You put your ear lobe between a space between the plastic and the needle, push a button and boom, you’ve punched a hole in your ear. Not sure what they’re supposed to do about the blood that you’d think would ensue.

No wonder we never see stores that do piercings. Does everyone do them by themselves? If someone knows, please tell me.

I’m reading the 9/11 commission report, and it’s got me thinking of terrorism in Tokyo, or rather how easy it would be for terrorists to wreak havoc here. There’s no security checkpoint to ride bullet trains, government buildings allow you in just by flashing your comany ID, and airline security is still quick and easy (travelers need only arrive at the airport 15 minutes prior to departure).

The biggest shock soon after I got here was when I went to cover a New Year’s reception given by the Keidanren for Japan’s top executives. Here was a room full of executives of companies that drive the Japanese economy — the heads of NTT, Toyota, Sony, the list goes on… There was not a single security check made for those attending. One bomb and poof….

At one point, the prime minister stopped by briefly to make a speech. To be sure, he had a couple of guards with him, but he wasn’t cordoned off, and at one point I was only two or three feet away from him. It goes without being said that this would never happen in the United States.

I heard later that the CEO of a certain foreign telco chided the Keidanren for their lapse of security. We’ll see if they do anything differently next year.

It totally pays to watch television in the morning. A couple weeks ago, I was watching a morning show before work and they were running a segment on fancy ice creams — one of them included Babbi, a genuine Italian gelato place in my neighborhood.

P and I went looking for it yesterday and found it within a 5-7 minute walking distance from our house. It’s a little expensive — about 600 yen for a piccolo, which comes with two small scoops of your choice. I chose creme caramel and tiramisu. P had tiramisu and pistachio. The cone was also very good as befits a gelateria that started out as a cone manufacturer.

It was totally my idea of bliss. It’s a good thing that it takes a little effort to get there because if it were any closer, I’d have to double my weekly running quota.

When four people, who have recently returned from the U.S., get together, the talk inevitably turns to food that we miss. Apart from an occasional craving for a large steak or a really good hamburger, I don’t miss much. Bread is better here, cake is better here, Italian food is awesome, and you can even get H&H bagels.

Not so with the other three men that I had lunch with today. One of them — an executive who was seconded to New York from a Japanese telco — had the funniest list of cravings. Here’s a rundown with his comments in no particular order:

– Auntie Anne’s pretzels: used to buy one at the Union Station on his way home from business trips to DC. has fond memories of greasy fingers on train rides home.

– Lipton tea bags: used to make ice tea with it. likes the fact that they have little taste. tried buying Lipton tea bags in Japan, but they are apparently made from real tea leaves, so the tea turns too bitter when left in the water for too long. now buys the U.S. brand at import stores.

– Americanized Japanese food: misses chicken teriyaki, American-style udon, sushi rice that has no vinegar taste.

Other items mentioned by the three include New York style pizza, Cinnabon (thank god they have it in Japan), Krispy Kreme, tacos, Vietnamese pho and supermarket cake (rather the awfulness of it).

I was laughing so hard, I was practically rolling on the floor.

Ever since it was reported by the media that one hot spring hotel in a famous resort was faking the color of its bath water, another resort also admitted that it was using regular water and passing it off as hot spring water.

The even more shocking thing is that, according to the “hot spring law” (yes, there is such a thing), it’s legal to say you have a natural hot spring bath as long as you have at least one of the 18 designated minerals in the bath water. There is also no regulation on how much of the water must contain the minerals. In other words, you can get a teaspoon of natural hot spring water, put it in your regular water, and charge people for the use of a natural hot spring bath.

I’m so disillusioned.

So I think my taste might be changing — or rather starting to be tainted by the awful girly Japanese taste — and I’m absolutely terrified.

I went out shopping with a girlfriend from work last weekend and I found myself picking up things (think Laura Ashley-ish pouches and other knick-knacks) that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked six months ago. Fortuately I’m not so far gone that I actually purchased them, but the entire episode still scares me.

It’s all the more scary, because I’ve actually started to think the way Japanese women wear jeans or pants is cute — they wear a mini skirt or dress over their pants, or they turn up the bottom of their pant legs so it looks like they have huge cuffs. Now I don’t think the look works for everyone. Like anything, they look best on slim women because a stout person with pants and a skirt just makes them look bigger.

Nevertheless, this is a big change in my stance on this type of fashion, because I used to look down on it. I swear I will kill myself if I start filling up my dresser with clothes with lots of lace, ribbons and embroidery.

It is so hot in Japan. Unimaginably hot. I hear some readers of my blog wonder whether I’ve stopped blogging. I haven’t, but it’s so hot I can barely think. My observational skills are severly dulled by the heat. Of course, it doesn’t help that you have to walk everywhere. I don’t think I’ve ever been this acquainted with my own sweat before now.

A couple weeks ago, the temperature in Tokyo hit a record high that was higher than the average temperature in New Delhi, India — 39.5 degrees celsius if that means anything (you’ll have to do your own conversion to farenheit because the heat has also turned up my laziness. The fall, winter or spring me might have provided a link but not the summer me).

The actual temperature, I believe, was higher because they apparently take the official temperature in a patch of grass in the middle of Tokyo. This is an act of deceit by the national weather service because most of the city is made of concrete, which contains all the heat and never cools down. Longtime Tokyo residents also say that the prevalence of air conditioners also antes up the heat because the outside units release warm air.

And the humidity level. You can’t know the meaning of the word, “humid”, unless you’ve been here during the summer.

Anyway, all this basically means that we are going through a lot more soap, shampoo, conditioner (two or more showers a day) and laundry detergent (six cycles a week at least) and our electric bill is going through the roof.

The unbelievable thing is that my husband P is training for a marathon in this heat. In fact, he’s out running ten miles as we speak. I used to run with him frequently, but lately, I’m doing well if I go out twice a week with him. I actually stopped for a couple weeks, but I started up again because I gained two pounds almost as soon as I stopped (scary but I’m only a half pound away from my running weight after two runs). Getting back to P, I make him take some coins with him so he can buy water at any of the hundred vending machines he passes by. He resisted at first, but not anymore.

While my husband is sweating his (increasingly) tight little butt off, I’m sitting in my nicely air-conditioned living room with a glass of ice tea and a popsicle (30 calories each, great for cooling you down from the inside). I briefly entertained the thought of going out for a run too but decided that touring around Tokyo for 8 hours with some German friends yesterday could be considered exercise. (Did you know that you burn the same amount of calories per distance whether you run or walk?).

The weather also failed my new pre-run test — turn off the air conditioner, open the windows, and sit on the couch. If you start sweating after five minutes, then it’s too hot to run.

My extremely fit mother-in-law (whom I absolutely love) might frown on my decision not to run, but it is SO hot that I even decided not to go get a foot massage at a reflexology place five minutes away because I didn’t want to have to walk there in the heat.