Gender apartheid and the world's least subtle advertising (not necessarily connected...)

Lunch today provided me with another opportunity to observe one of the stranger aspects of Japanese restaurants/cafes/bars: the frequent gender disparity. In contrast to the chicken-on-as-stick/beer joints that are entirely full of be-suited men after work (so, from no earlier than 8pm), if you go to a cafe or bar on a weekday before about 8pm, it will be ENTIRELY FULL OF WOMEN. Just as I'm not sure where all the men are hiding (presumably being famously inefficient at the office), I'm not sure what these women do - plenty of them certainly don't look like they have a job. Well, I suppose if you've completed the first few stages of the typical Japanese Female Life Strategy (find good job in order to find good mate, get married, take early retirement [before 30 - even most traders would be happy with that I reckon]) then maybe you don't have anything other to do than be a Lady Who Lunches. Until later in the afternoon, when you become a Lady Who Goes For Coffee. This is indeed a strangely pre-political-correctness society. However, there are no great protests going on, no burning of expensive and fashionable undergarments, not even any significant feminist movement. (Yet...?)

In an almost certainly unrelated but nonetheless peculiar aspect of Japanese life, the one-year contract Softbank (mobile phone company) had with Cameron Diaz has just ended, and she has been replaced by Snoopy. Equally irrelevant, although a darn sight less creepy to see on a five-storey-high poster - Miss Diaz's nose is VERY strange. This ad campaign was a classic example of the unbelievable power of celebrity in Japanese branding. In some of the posters, she wasn't even holding a mobile phone, she was just wearing very bad clothes and associating her face with the brand... Whichever braindead advertising "creative" took home a paypacket in return for the campaign should be sacked. Or maybe not - it was probably very successful. That ridiculous bit in Lost in Translation with the whiskey ad isn't far wrong - Tommy Lee Jones is currently advertising canned coffee by just looking very sulky (something which comes naturally to him of course), and Richard Gere was briefly on posters for the wonderfully named "Dandy House", a men's Este company (facials etc, although presumably his face is no longer made of skin and so doesn't require that kind of service...)

Rrrrrrrrrrright, back to revision for the Inevitable Japanese Test - less than a week to go now.