When I did not take Yoshinoya's announcement to stop offering gyudon (beef strips on rice) completely serious earlier this year (and it was unbelievable after all), I was wrong. Since February, there has been no more gyudon at the big ex-gyudon chain stores (only the fourth largest franchise, Kobe Lamputei, switched to Australian beef), and Yoshinoya's customer volume fell 32 percent. But Japanese engineers have come up with a possible solution: A PlayStation game that puts you in the role of a Yoshinoya employee. And digital beef is apparently safe enough, so there is gyudon in the game.

In related news, a Yoshinoya spokesman yesterday said that they are ready to resume sales if Japan eases its ban on US beef. An exemption for meat from young cows is currently under consideration.

The Japanese language is phonetically rather simple and has fewer sounds than most other languages (they overcompensate that with the complex writing system, of course). It creates considerable confusion (and amusement) among foreigners when there is no difference between Ls and Rs and Bs, Ws, and Vs. So far I have been quite good at figuring things out, but they really got me this week: Shibuya station at the moment is plastered with big posters for a new PlayStation soccer manager game, depicting a somewhat familiar looking guy in several poses. The slogans seemed to indicate a German loan word, Bengel (young, somewhat rude fellow). Angry bengel, happy bengel, thoughtful bengel and so on. After passing it every day for a week or so, I finally figured it out. Sega were not announcing that their game can turn grown men into mischievous little boys (using a word that does not show up in my Japanese dictionary), they were just parading the fact that one of the biggest names in professional soccer is endorsing their product. It reads not Bengel, but Wenger, as in Arsene Wenger, who just led Arsenal London through a season without a single defeat. Stupid me.