Welcome to the Kawashima Mystery Cafe! Be generous!

Cabel’s Blog LOL reports on a strange cafe in Kawashima, Japan, where you get what the last person ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered:

For the record, here are the rules of the Ogori cafe:

1. Let’s treat the next person. What to treat them with? It’s your choice.
2. Even if it’s a group of friends or a family, please form a single-file line. Also, you can’t buy twice in a row.
3. Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it. (If you really, really hate it, let’s quietly give it to another while saying, “It’s my treat…”)
4. Let’s say “Thank You! (Gochihosama)” if you find the person with your Ogori cafe card.
5. We can’t issue a receipt.

So what would you do if you found this cafe? Would you try to score while being cheap to the person next to you? Or would you be generous even if you didn’t know who was next?

The American bloggers who stumbled onto the cafe chose the latter option:

Mike went up to the cafe, slapped down a couple thousand yen (~$25), and ordered a little bit of everything: some ice cream, some snacks, some candy, some drinks, a Japanese horn-of-mysterious-plenty intentionally set up as a shocking surprise for the next lucky customer. (After his order, Mike received single iced coffee.)

As we walked away from the cafe, with just the right amount of delay, we heard an extremely excited “arigato goazimasu!! thank you so much!!” yelled in our direction, from an ecstatic mom and her equally excited young son. They truly appreciated the surprise.

It was so worth it.

Oh Japan

There is a new breed of Japanese man, who rejects the caveman macho mentality of his forefathers, who are unmoved by the call of flesh, hence their label: soshoku-danshi, the plant-eating male. Less driven by ambition, money, or sexual conquest, these fashion-conscious herbivores are shy around women, which ironically makes them the chosen prey of more carnivorous women.

“I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability,” Junichiro Hori says, “because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness.”

While the traditional hard-working Baby Boomers frown at such limp-wristedness, Japan has a long tradition of androgyny anyway, with Noh and Kabuki for men, and the Takarazuka Revue for women.

Look! I'm a girl so it's totally okay to eat parfaits!

And while I have more of an omnivorous bent (I prefer the Middle Way in everything), I’m happy to note that I can finally eat parfaits in Tokyo without people looking at me strangely. I mean, back in the 90s, Ranma had to change into his girl-form just to eat sweet desserts! That’s like… medieval.

Oh, Japan.

Yes, this is a common Japanese prank. Oh, Japan...

I’ve posted a lot of bizarre Japanese commercials lately, and a lot of Downtown Gaki no Tsukai, just to highlight the point that Japan is a truly messed-up place. Some of those commercials were forwarded to me by my sister, who attached them to an email that simply said, “Oh Japan…”

There are a lot of things about Japan that make me go, “Oh Japan…” in a partly-amused, partly-resigned, sighing-while-shaking-your-head way.

At the top of my list is ‘kancho’.

Here is the definition of kancho, according to Kancho.jp:

Kancho- n: a friendly enema; v: to vigorously thrust extended index fingers towards another person’s anal region

It probably really hurts this much.

You read that correctly. Apparently an act that falls squarely under the second mode of rape under the Revised Penal Code (the insertion of ‘any instrument or object, into the genital or anal orifice of another person’) is a hilarious, good-natured prank in Japan. In Naruto, this move is apparently called the Thousand Years of Death. I’m sure it feels that way.

Kancho.org also provides a handy-dandy guide for performing kancho, disturbingly titled ‘Kancho University’. It also provides a handy link to a Korean flash game called the Dong Chim Game, which means that Korean and Japan share more than they usually care to admit, more being unsolicited anal probing.

In fact kancho is such a common prank in both cultures that a South Korean developer created an arcade game called Boong-Ga Boong-Ga back in 2001.

Behold the glory:

Highly Praised at the Tokyo Game Show! WTF!

Apparently the game is played by performing kancho on the jeans-wearing human posterior sticking out of the arcade cabinet. Also, if you score high enough, the game dispenses plastic trophies in the shape of… crap.

The game was localized for Japan, renaming it ‘Kancho Geemu’. As if it wasn’t clear enough to begin with.

Oh, Japan…