I don’t know why, but Japanese LOVE slogans and mottos. If you walk into a train station, a poster will say, “Children are watching. Mind your train manners” or simply, “Walk! Don’t run”. Elevators in traditional office buildings might say, “Quiet please in the elevator. You don’t know who is listening” (which is actually pretty smart advice) or, like I saw the other day, “Greet your colleagues with a smile.” If you look around, I can guarantee that you will see slogans everywhere. In fact, until recently, men would walk around neighborhoods, clapping two blocks in a steady rhythym shouting, “Take care with fire!” in a solemn monotone. It’s a holdover from when people had wood-burning ovens or gas stoves with valves that needed to be closed every night. The practice has all but disappeared, though I know it’s still around in some areas because I heard it recently.

Japanese are trained in slogan-writing as a child. When I was in fifth grade, I remember homework, where we had to create our own poster about staying healthy. In sixth grade, we had to create a poster, about an environmental issue — I vaguely remember doing something about smoking, but there were others on littering or pollution.

The best one that I saw recently was a bathroom in an office building. The toilets were Japanese style, where you have to squat. Right at eye level, there was a piece of paper that said, “How you use the toilet is a reflection of yourself.”

I emailed in sick early this morning. Cough, cough. Seriously, my throat is a bit scratchy but I mostly called in “sick” because the thought of dealing, by myself mind you, with that too large of a group of overly pampered children for an hour was too much to bear. And honestly, I’m thinking of quitting that part-time gig or at the very least, working fewer hours.

Because I don’t have to work, my bullshit threshold is low. This means that when I hint that I don’t want to be alone with ten children between the ages of four and nine with varying degrees of English proficiency, I mean that if you continue to assign this challenge (nightmare) to me, I’ll walk. Get someone else to play London Bridge or read Curious George. Incidentally, I have no idea how the same damn story can be so appealing to those kids over and over again. I keep hoping that halfway into yet another tale of Curious George’s misadventures, the “man with the yellow hat” takes out a Smith and Wesson and wastes that fucking monkey.

Today started like every other except that I knew I had the day to spend doing whatever the hell I wanted to do. I put on my favorite shirt that I got at this vintage shop on the Lower East Side when I was still living in New York and took a stroll thru Nakameguro and by the Meguro Canal. I had a proper lunch at Michelangelo’s in Daikanyama. Salad, pasta, dessert, coffee and a couple of glasses of red wine, of course. I then went window shopping at those furniture design shops down the street. I just got back to the apartment. So much to do and see literally steps from my apartment. I didn’t get on a train to do or see any of the above.

So why the fuck do I bother with a job at all? Guilt? Self-worth? Masochism? Do I crave a life of leisure? To be some spoiled bitch? Maybe. Maybe not.

Moving to Japan meant shifting my definition of self from me-centered to we-centered. I say “we” a lot more now. “We” like that restaurant. “We” get our green tea there too. “We” think that place is overrated. There is a lot of “we” going on and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

The money I do make from my part-time gig allows us to more easily say “fuck it” and go to the Westin near our apartment and have a martini and read the FT on a Sunday afternoon (eventhough we’re technically a day late for the FT they always find one for us at the gift shop). Would we do this anyway? Probably. But it would be harder to justify.

And that’s really what it’s all about anyway, right? To justify. Can I justify my life? Not to others but to myself. And do I really need to?

It’s election season again. In Japan, this means that the city becomes infested all of a sudden with little trucks, vans and buses with candidates names on big boards on top, blaring a short speech asking everyone to vote for them. The right wingers I get — they post themselves at intersections or drive around major roads at any given time throughout the year, annoying people with “patriotic” right-wing music. Theirs is noise pollution. They live to disrupt. What I don’t get are these campaigners. Do people really reward them for driving around their neighborhood with microphones at 8:30 in the morning? Well, I don’t. They were there this morning, as I was coming out the door. I pointedly ignored them. And it was not without some satisfaction that I threw out my election ballot this evening when I got the mail (nevermind the fact that I wouldn’t have voted anyway).

The other night I rented Prom Night Two: Hello Mary Lou, a very silly 80’s slasher flick. Look, I enjoy scary movies, even when they are not at all scary but instead so stupid they are comedies. Besides, my partner is out of town on business so renting a real scary movie now would mean not sleeping at all.

The first and only time I saw this movie, until last night, was back in high school and given that I’m a gay man, I didn’t remember that the movie included a few vagina shots. Back then they were hairier than their present counterparts and so harder to miss but I wasn’t interested in that. Still, if those ‘gina shots were fuzzed-out when I first saw the movie, I’d be more likely to remember them. How can a pixeled vagina not cause more of a stir than a vagina al fresco?

Here in Japan they disagree, or at least the censors do. The offending vaginas were pixeled (pixelated?) out of view, fuzzed-out, and this offends me. Not only does it make me remember them more than I would if they were not censored, it makes me feel like a stupid child with an overprotective parent looking over my shoulder.

What will the censors do when Babel is released in Japan? When I saw that movie in The States and the Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi bared all, the first thing I thought was “How are the Japanese censors going to deal with this?” Incidentally, her performance was the best one in that movie, with or without a “money shot.”

I love fruit. And ever since an exploration of completely unknown fruits to me in Bali introduced me to a wonderful fruit, called the mangosteen, I am very curious and adventurous about fruit that I’ve never seen before. Besides, unlike meat or fish or other stuff, how bad/lethal could a fruit be? Well, today I found out.

On a trip back to the U.S., I found a fruit that I’d never seen before in a fancy grocery store. They called it the cactus pear, and promised an exotic sweetness. It was ruby red and had those bumps like a cactus, but smooth otherwise. I love pears, so naturally, I had to taste it. I was surprised that cacti bore fruit like this and very curious about its taste. I picked one up, rubbed my hands all over it, imagining what it would taste like, and then put it in a plastic bag in my cart. Five minutes later, I discovered the other reason why it’s called a cactus pear. It had hundreds of tiny little thorns that you can barely see, and thanks to my carelessness, they all ended up on my fingers. I pulled out the ones I can see, but they’re still pricking me.

The Cook’s Thesaurus says they’re popular in Hispanic and Mediterranean countries for the color they can add to salads and other dishes. If the store had called them by some of their more helpful names — like “prickly pear” — I might have been forewarned. Of course, once we bought the fruit, and I bore the pain, I couldn’t not eat it. And so arming myself with a rubber glove to hold the thing down, I peeled it with a knife, carefully wiping the blade on a paper towel in between cuts (per my sister’s advice), touching it as little as possible. The fruit was as ruby red as the outside with seeds inside that made it look a little like a pomegranate. I took my first bite in anticipation of seeing heaven. The reality? It was bitter and tasted like watered-down watermelon — just like the Cook’s Thesaurus said it would if I had bothered to look it up before I cut it up.

My advice: If it looks like a cactus and is called a cactus, then it probably feels like a cactus. My only consolation is that I didn’t bite into the damn fruit.