I may not be teaching English in Japan anymore and spend my days at a desk, but my life still ends up being rather eventful. As I said earlier, I get a lot of junk mail. I’m sure it’s all a part of city (and apartment) life, but I still find the sheer breadth and quantity of the advertisements fascinating, so I decided to do you all the favor (?) and document all the inane junk I get over the week so we can all share in the joy of the random stuff that ends up in my mail box. So, without further ado…

Let’s Read Jason!’s (junk) Mail

Monday Edition

And trust me, we’re starting off strong.

Continue reading Let’s Read Jason!’s (junk) Mail – Monday

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I may not be teaching English in Japan anymore and spend my days at a desk, but my life still ends up being rather eventful. As I said earlier, I get a lot of junk mail. I’m sure it’s all a part of city (and apartment) life, but I still find the sheer breadth and quantity of the advertisements fascinating, so I decided to do you all the favor (?) and document all the inane junk I get over the week so we can all share in the joy of the random stuff that ends up in my mail box. So, without further ado…<\/p>\n

Let’s Read Jason!’s (junk) Mail<\/span><\/h2>\n

Monday Edition<\/h3>\n

And trust me, we’re starting off strong.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Need<\/a>

Need a friend?<\/p><\/div>\n

Let’s take a look at this picture for a second. We’ve got pretty girls, prices, and times–and that’s all without being able to read what it says. If you can actually read it, it basically offers you a ‘dream time’ and talks about how they’re waiting to hear from you.<\/p>\n

Why waste your money at a cabaret when you can bring the cabaret girls to you?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I know what this is. You<\/em> know what this is. But what I was trying to figure out was: how is this not what it obviously looks like?<\/strong> And that, right there, is where it gets interesting.<\/p>\n

Proving that I have no hobbies of note, I decided to look this up on Wikipedia. I get these types of advertisements all the time (the kind of thing you’d see in Vegas) and some of them advertise massages, others don’t even attempt at a pretext. But if you’re going to do something illegal, it seems to me that putting advertisements with your phone number in thousands of mailboxes is a bad idea. Worse yet, they accept credit cards. How do you not get arrested for blatantly flying in the face of the law?<\/p>\n

Well, because it’s not illegal<\/em>. Turns out companies like this rely on loopholes in the Japanese law where it’s only illegal if the person you’re paying is “a stranger”. If you get to know each other for 5 minutes, hey, you’re best friends now! It’s all under a system called \u30c7\u30ea\u30d8\u30eb (deriheru<\/em>, delivery health). Huh… who knew?<\/p>\n

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SAVE STUFF!<\/p><\/div>\n

Going in a completely different direction, we’ve got this little gem right here; an advertisement called “Collection Times” offering all sorts of storage opportunities for my messy-home needs. My, just what I need! The many recommendations and claims go from the reasonable (“Store your seasonal goods during the off-season!”) to the insane (“Save those boxes of magazines you’ve collected and come read them any time!”). I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I don’t have a strong desire to read a magazine now, I’m not going to want to read it in 2-3 years from now. They push the fact that the service is ‘safe’, ‘private’, and ‘open 24 hours’ over and over, which leads me to only one natural and obvious conclusion: The service is clearly meant for serial kilers. I mean, how many of us find ourselves with a strong desire to go and look at our locked-away goods, all alone, at 3 in the morning? Trust me: that Santa Claus statuette you have will be just fine\u00a0without you, even if you have to wait a few more hours to check on it. It’s the middle of June; he’s not going anywhere. They also recommend it for your baby strollers, for when you just might need it again<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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If you use this service, your table changes color!<\/p><\/div>\n

Front and center, we’ve got the amazing ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot of her house. Obviously, using this service will increase the size of your table and make you somehow more intelligent, which stops you from putting your boots in the middle of your living room<\/strong>. I’m pretty sure that’s not a space problem. It’s a logic issue.<\/p>\n

That, unfortunately, brings our review of my Monday junk mail to a close, but I’ll be back again soon with the wonders that were awaiting me on Tuesday (hint: it involves haircuts and earthquakes).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,3,5],"tags":[64,65,36,67,66,68,69],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}