Sixty-one days into 2007, I finally managed to replace the last calendar on our walls, this being the Bic Camera Calendar in the bed room. The Bic Camera Calendar is one large sheet of paper (A0?) that covers the whole year on one page. It is issued for free at the end of the year for free by the Bic Camera chain of electronic stores. I first came in contact with it years back in the classroom of a Japanese language school. The Bic Camera Calendar is a wealth of useful information, boarding on being overloaded, but in a good way. This year's edition features

• a map of Japan
  • eleven insets for the various remote islands
  • lots of place names
  • roads and shipping lines
  • latitudes and longitudes, annotated with other world cities that are located there
  • compass (English and Japanese, with pronunciation guide for both, as with most names on the calendar)
• calendars for the twelve months
  • English and Japanese names for the week days
  • English and Traditional Japanese month names, with an explanation of where the traditional name came from
  • some arcane system of naming/counting days that I do not understand
  • important weather events according to the lunar calendar
  • colour photographs of flowers in bloom during that month
  • lunar phases
  • the 2006 edition also had December of the previous year, but that must have been pushed out by some newly included section
• an explanation of the annotations for fortune tellers in the calendar
• a chart for the animals of the Chinese calendar
• a chart for the Japanese Imperial calendar (goes back to 1925)
• subway and train maps for the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Sapporo (pointing out where the Bic Camera stores are)
• a list of thirteen World Heritage cultural and natural locations (cross-referenced with the map)
• a list of telephone numbers and web sites (including QR codes for mobile phone access) for Bic Camera and Sofmap.

I whole-heartedly recommend the Bic Camera Calendar, and everyone should have one (or more).