Warning: This episode is neither work safe nor podsafe. It will corrupt your children and jeopardize your career. And if that weren’t bad enough, it’ll probably hurt your eardrums too.
Last night I had fish & chips with cider at an English pub in Akasaka, took a stroll, talked with a few kyakubiki (customer pullers), and finished up the evening with karaoke. Recently I showed off some photos of me when I was younger, and a friend told me I looked like Freddy Mercury when I was in college, so I chose a song from Queen to sing.
This will either be interesting or it will be the podcasting equivalent of sitting through a slide show of vacation photos. We’ll see. I’m still figuring this stuff out.
Someone mentioned that my podcast reminded them of the weekly public radio program This American Life, so I decided to check it out. For the past two weeks I’ve been listening to it eight hours a day at work. So for this episode I decided to try to take a lesson from them. No way is it anywhere near as good as This American Life, but then again they have a team of 10 professional producers working full-time on every episode. And there’s no background music in mine. Too much trouble.
Update: I fixed the broken link to the MP3 file. Update: The last minute or so of the file didn’t get uploaded. That’s been fixed too.
Wow, youse guys are so lucky! Two and a half podcasts flom Japan in one weekend! Oh how I envy you.
There are photos in the gallery. The truth is they’ve been there for quite a while.
Some of the topics of discussion I had with the woman who cut my hair:
I am a podcaster. That’s why I took all those photos while I was waiting, and it’s also why I have microphones in my ears.
She never heard of podcasting, but she knows about MP3 players.
She said, “So this is kind of like watching a video clip filmed while riding a roller coaster and feeling like you’re there, eh?”
She’s still using Windows 98. Needs to upgrade but not looking forward to the pain of transferring all her programs to a new computer. The other day she cut a guy’s hair who said he has three PCs that are still running Windows 95. I said he must really like it.
Until 8 years ago, it was illegal to run a shop like QB House because of strict sanitary regulations. Also, the minimum price for a haircut was regulated. ($30-$40 minimum) In fact, the association for hair cutters still requires members to fix their prices. QB House isn’t a member.
The 300th QB House in Japan will open soon. There are stores in other countries too. She mentioned Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
You get to keep the comb.
QB House links:
Business is booming. The number of customers is in orange, the number of stores in blue
The “service unit.” Nice and sterile sounding, eh? You can hold your mouse over areas of the image to see explanations most of you won’t be able to read. But it’s cool because it’s in Japanese, right?
The next generation cutting station will include a video monitor to bombard customers with advertisements deliver various information to customers.
Employment info. Full time employees make about US $22-45,000 a year. Part-timers make $10/hr and up, which means the company is really raking in money, but keep in mind that rent and electricity here are quite expensive.
If the lack of commentary in The Frogcast made you pine for the velvety smoothness of my voice, you’re going to love this episode. It’s blabberific! (TM) And every time I say “um” you have to take a drink. (Or come to think of it, maybe I should take a drink.)
Pretty self-explanatory, this one. Last night I attached my earbud microphones to my glasses with rubber bands to minimize the “cranial backwash,” walked outside to the rice paddy next to our house, sat there quietly for about 10 minutes or so then went back inside.
I recommend listening to it with headphones on–your best pair–and in a very quiet setting. The detail is incredible, if I do say so myself. You can hear exactly what I was hearing. Try picking out the two times I scratched my head.
It loops very well. I feel asleep listening to it and dreamed I had little vicious frogs stuck in my hair. No joke.
I’m using the NYU Distributed Network to cache and distribute this podcast. Please let me know if there are any problems with it.
Bah. I didn’t realize I recorded in mono until I got home. Sorry for all the wind noise. Need to do something about that. I should try to make shorter podcasts from now on.
Hitch a ride inside my head while I roam the streets of Kabukicho in search of…well, audio. My favorite part is when I buy a bottle of green tea from a vending machine and you can hear the sound of me drinking it as if you were there inside my head. The hawkers who try to temp me into their tittie bars, nightclubs and whorehouses won’t take no for an answer until I practically beat them over the head with it. There are a few craptacular camera phone pics in the gallery. I also updated the gallery for last week’s show.
Please don’t announce this podcast to tens of thousands of people. I don’t want to incur the wrath of the bandwidth gods. Let’s leave it as a well-kept secret for now.
The tour was so long that I didn’t get to cover some things I wanted to, like my meeting with Scott Lockman of Tokyo Calling. He came to my company’s office on Thursday evening to discuss a teaching gig. It’s funny how radio guys never look the way you imagine them. Matching the face with the voice for the first time is like watching a movie that’s been dubbed–only difference is the mouth moves in perfect sync with the voice.
My apologies to those of you on dial-up connections–this one’s also a bigun’. Also, sorry for the audio levels being set way too high, but unless you’re an audiophile you probably won’t notice. Just turn the volume down a bit.
Thanks to everyone who left comments. What a nice bunch of people you all are.
My first podcast! What an ordeal it is to put one of these things together, but the most fun I’ve had by myself in a long time. Guzzling red wine probably helped.
Intro: Guano Apes
See the photo gallery! If there’s nothing there, I fell asleep before I got a chance to upload photos. Check back later. I’ll get them up, promise.
Masagoro’s home page. In addition to being an accomplished artist, fluent in baby talk in two languages and performing original songs on toy piano outside the Shibuya station, a Google search reveals that she’s also a published poet.
