Ubiquitious engrish
One Minute English
(flat screen ads continuous shown inside Tokyo’s Yamanote train)–YouTube Video by Pythagore
One of the stranger aspects of living in Tokyo is that I’m constantly being bombarded with messages for me to learn English. There’s always that awkward moment when some temp girl on a street corner tries to give me a free package of kleenex with English school advertising on it and realizes I must speak English (but may want kleenex).
Anyway, watch the video above that runs continuously on flat screens inside the train cars of the JR Yamanote Line (山の手線) that encompasses and defines real ground-zero Tokyo.
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May 15th, 2006 at 6:34 am
In March, I saw these ads on the train and the snippet I saw highlighted phases “Leave me alone!” and “I’m so lonely”, which I thought were fairly common thoughts among most people in the the 23 Ku, if not most of Japan.
May 15th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Ah I remember those phases “Leave me alone!” and “I’m so lonely”, on the train. Many English lessons in Japan offer a window to the dark Japanese soul.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Hi
Just to let you know that when I see your blog in FireFox (news.3yen.com), instead of the pictures I see some pictures that say “Be Happy (100% free) http://www.3yen.com“. This happens even when I see the single post. This doesn’t happens in internet explorer.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
YIKES! Thanks for the heads-up!
What is odd is that we all use Firefox here and hardly ever use Explorer.
Weird. I’ll go around my other machines and proxies to look for the cause.
That “Be Happy (100% free) http://www.3yen.com” picture is only supposed to show up on other websites trying to “leach” our images.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Also happens when reading the blog through Bloglines.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:00 am
Ah, this gets weirder and weirder. We also use Bloglines via Firefox here but we cannot replicate this image error (even after dumping all our browser caches and cookies). When the 3Yen webmonkey gets back from his long weekend, he’ll just erase that “leach” image. Until then (Weds?) please just ignore the images (I don’t have the access authority to that part of the website’s HTML.)
May 16th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Hmmm. I don’t see any “Be Happy (100% free) http://www.3yen.com” picture. There’s just the regular images staring with a cute picture of a Harajuku girl with a black umbrella.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
I have been asking friends to check, here the first reply:
I was figuring as much—generally such problems are a firewall/antivirus problem or a browser “security” perference settings. I’ll keep working on fixing the problem.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:40 am
I usually use Safari most of the time (and it the site looks fine with that) but I’ve heard all the kwel kids are using firefox nowadays so I do have it loaded on my machine. But I’ve fired up firefox (1.5.0.1) and the page looks fine to me on this end. I haven’t tweeked any of my settings on firefox, so the problem might just be that prpblematic firefox set up vs. the whole program.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
THE 3YEN WEBMONKEY IS BACK IN HIS CAGE AND SAYS….
Hey Taro,
Thanks, and thanks to him for letting you know. :)
I can’t replicate either, and it doesn’t make much sense that IE would be ok and FFox not. Perhaps the opposite I could understand but… I think there must be something one layer deeper, such as the guy using a proxy with his ISP at home for example, and the pages go through another server or something, and IE at work with direct connection.
Well, something strange like this.
It would interesting to investigate a bit further, but right now, I
don’t even know where the problem could come from at all… :/
Mmmm…
Best,
webMonkeyman