While the lovely Ang regales you with tales of embroidery floss and chicken chitlins, I’ve been stuck at my desk (which also serves as our dining room table, ironing board, craft bench, and La-Z-Boy). Someone has to bring home all those delicious chitlins.

But I hope to occasionally make an appearance here, offering to you the blog equivalent of “Gee, look at that!” I do not pretend to have any expertise in the latest of Tokyo awesomeness. I call it a good day if I can determine, when offered something, if I’m supposed eat it, wipe my hands with it, or attach it as a charm to my cellphone.

That said, Tokyo is in the future in every sense of the word, or at least in a few senses of the word. How many senses of the word are there? Hmm, philosophers to your battle stations! So perhaps you will be amused by what you see through my astigmatic eyes. Or perhaps not!

I realize my slovenly presence on this delightful, charming blog may be a bit jarring, but I promise to tuck in my shirt and run a comb through my hair before stepping through these doors.

First up, packaging:

One of the things I heard about Japan before I arrived was the excessive amount of packaging that is used. And so far, we’ve seen a lot of that to be true. Individually packaged bananas, bags and cup trays for a takeout coffee, etc. Now, as an American, I can’t take a stance of environmental righteousness. We have temperature-controlled outdoor stadiums. Still, a banana has packaging built right into it. It’s cool. Leave it be, Japan.

But packaging can also be brilliant. I start many mornings with onigiri, a triangle of rice about the size of a hockey puck, filled with fish, or vegetable, and then wrapped in nori (toasted seaweed, for the savages in the room). To keep the nori crisp and dry, the packaging prevents the rice from touching the nori until you open it, even though the nori is already wrapped around the rice. I won’t get in to the specifics because it will require a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method, which I don’t possess, but please take my word that it is awesome and the future.