It gets dark SO early already!

The most difficult part of adjusting to Japan time/getting over jet lag, has been the difference in sunrise and sunset here.

The sun rises at 5 am and sets around 5:30 pm. Which means, at 6 pm, like right now, it's already dark in Tokyo. So I am thinking, gee, it must be closer to bedtime then I thought. Oh, no. I haven't had dinner yet. It's dinner time. It's still way too early to go to bed. If I went to bed now I would totally screw up my sleeping schedule. I'll stay up.

But getting up early has been no problem so far! :-D

a plus

Commercials on Japanese TV

I have kind of been watching Japanese TV. I say "kind of" because I mostly leave it on in the room while I am reading or at the computer. It is, of course, difficult to watch TV when you don't understand the language, especially if you have never seen the program before. (That makes it unlike watching a familiar movie in Spanish.) I am beginning to follow the commercials however. They are the most intriguing, and rely on appeals to people at our most basic levels, often as well as on other levels, so are easier to understand.

What I find strange about them, as would probably be true of American commercials to a foreigner as well, is that they tend to employ over-used American and other International songs as a soundtrack to their product. Some examples

• The Carpenter's song Close to You was in a car commercial I think. (You know the song, it goes, "Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?")
• The classic "Danke schoen, Darling, danke schoen." An instrumental only version is played for the majority of the commercial, the lyrics come in at the very end, and are cut off in the middle of a sentence.
  
• The Cars Magic, Oh oh, it's magic, you know. . . I can't even remember what commercial this is in, but, being that it's in American commercials as well, I guess the only weird thing is that suddenly there's English coming out of Japanese tv.
  
• Now the best one, and I saved if for last, is a scratch tickets commercial. .. Where they yodel. Yodelling apparently sells Japanese scratch tickets. Who would have guessed?