Are All Snack Bars Run by Someone Called "Mama"?

So, I went a little crazy at the 100-yen-shoppe on the way home today.  I've got kids, and friends, and friends with kids, and words with friends®, and I will be in Florida in just a few days from where I plan on shipping something(s).  But the things I got are really cool, mostly because they are Japanese and have Japanese words on them.  If you ever have a spare 100 yen, send it to me and I'l pick you up something cool at the shoppe.

Many of my friends have figured out by now that I went out to dinner with the president last night.  He's only in town about once a month, as I think I've mentioned before, and he almost always takes me and at leas one other person to Jigemonya, a little pub/tavern that serves giant sea snails, whole octopi, and whale.  So imagine my surprise when he suggested a different place!  Go on, jst take a moment to imagine it.  If you don't know me well, just picture yourself surprised at something, but with my face photoshopped onto the front of your head.

So we went to ToriKatsu, which is a whole nother little pub/tavern where the man running it stands behind a bar in the middle of the room and has one teeny tiny charcoal grill upon which he cooks everything for everyone in the whole restaurant.  It looks just like the man in this picture, in fact, because it IS the man in this picture, and this is the restaurant.  I tried to make this photo really huge so you could see that he's grilling four or five whole squid, but you still can't tell.  Oh well.  To the left is a giant wall of Japanese booze bottles, and each one has a name written on it.  You see, when you buy a bottle at this tavern, you pay for the whole bottle up front.  But the next time you come, if there's any left in our bottle, you don't have to re-buy it.  And this liquor tastes like potato brandy with sand and ash, so there's always bound to be some left in your bottle!

After ToriKatsu, we went to the president's favorite snack bar, Snack Funny.  He loves going there, and I'm not sure why.  It's a quaint little place, but kind of lonesome.  Lonesome as in all the bartenders are flirtatious ladies and (almost) all the clientele are single men on the verge of passing out from the place they were drinking previously, and they love to sing karaoke to the lady bartenders.  Also, when you sing karaoke at Snack Funny, the karaoke machine gives you a score based on how well you sang.  Also, as it tabulates your score, as your score goes up more and more area on a picture of a naked lady is revealed on the tv screen.  But don't worry everyone, no one EVER scores above the mid-80's, so the picture never actually gets that risqué.  But the single old men hunched over their whiskies are always so proud of "how close they got" with that last song, which really was pretty terrible.

However, one thing the ladies at Snack Funny DO offer that many places don't is a little piece of southern country.  Did you know they had stuff like this anywhere but the midwest and northernmost edges of the south?  Me either.  But they do, right here in Japan.  Right on the back of the toilet in the back of the bar with the nudie karaoke and the lady bartenders who will literally talk about ANY topic--no limits--as long as you will stay and keep drinking.

Speaking of signs in the bathroom, Snack Funny also has this sign hanging near the toilet, which I really like and hope to get for my own  home some day.

It says simply, "Control, more than speed."

I had a couple of even funnier stories, but I realized they might not be appropriate for public forum, so you'll have to ask me in private.

One last thing: have you ever heard of a Tanuki?  If you have played Super Mario Brothers 3, you might remember that next to the frog suit, it was probably the cutest outfit Mario had.  But if you haven't ever played that, then you might be tempted to look up a definition or translation, where you'll most likely find something like "Japanese raccoon-dog" which means absolutely nothing to you.  But I have wanted a household tanuki (not a live animal, but rather a statue of one that is common in Japan) because they supposedly bring good fortune.  But more than that, I've always wanted one because they look like this:

And now you can clearly see I have one.