The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.
These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.
The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a charge, I'm guessing they'd brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.
The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan's massive, partially government-owned telecom.
I can't wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I've found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.
Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.
I was wandering the Loft department store at Shinsaibashi in Osaka, Japan, last week when I found a display surrounding this video. Give it a watch and see if you can tell what it's advertising...
$16 pens at Osaka's Shinsaibashi branch of Loft.
(Credit: Sinobyte)Well, did you get it? From the Pen Spinning Association Japan comes the Penz'Gear line of sticks to spin artfully in your fingers, complete with an instructional DVD to teach you techniques for the following techniques: Normal, Reverse, FingerPass, BackAround, Harmonic, and Tornado.
You're not going to catch me saying that this proves "the Japanese" are weird. On the contrary, I was the only one paying attention to this display in a very busy store. It is fun, however, to think about the folks who made the video and whatever process of retail selection (or payoffs) that might have given it this prominence.
I can only hope that this post brings out a subculture of people who are better at playing with pens than I am to explain to me how a properly weighted pen is essential to the art. As for me, I'm back to doodling.
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