Meat pies, Australia’s national dish, are cheaper in Japan (even though they’re made in Bairnsdale) than they are in Australia. オーストラリアの国民食であるミートパイが豪産にも関わらず日本で買っても安い。 Tim Tams, too, up with Aussie Beef as a symbolic food from Down Under, sell in Tokyo for a fraction of the price that Aussie consumers pay for the bikkies. お馴染みのオージービーフと並べてオーストラリアの代表的な食品であるティムタムも日本で買った方が安い。 I haven’t looked up the price of Australian beef, but I’d reckon there’s a good chance Japanese consumers have a world away are getting it cheaper than their Australian counterparts. オージービーフの値段を調べていないが、上記の傾向によって恐らく原産国が地球の半分ぐらい離れている日本の消費者がまたオーストラリアの消費者ほど払わないで食べられているかと推測しています。 This is happening because there is a duopoly controlling Australian supermarkets, according to The Australia Institute, a public policy think…
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Very glad to have grown up in a society that still seems to ostensibibly respect democracy and the rule of law, I was delighted to visit the Australian Embassy in Tokyo and partake of democracy manifest in the form of a snag. The bleak, wet day (eerily reminscent of my native Melbourne) was the backdrop to consular officials serving democracy sausages as Aussies flocked to the embassy to vote ahead of the May 3 federal election. I’m very grateful to the Embassy staff for putting on the sausage sizzle, and got to spend a lot of time chatting with some…
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Aussie voters in Tokyo will be able to snag a democracy sausage if they go to the Australian Embassy in Tokyo from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Friday, May 2, according to the Embassy website. This be an opportunity to exercise a hard-fought right to vote (or avoid being fined for not doing so because votng is compulsory). And it also presents an extremely rare instance of being able to see consular officials helping Australians and earning some of the cost of the world’s most expensive passports, ensuring the documents are not a complete rort. Australia is one of…
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Much to the chagrin or Mrs. Kangaeroo, our garden is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful Australian creatures, and they’re designed to look nice nocturnally. We have all sorts of kangaroos. Their sizes range from life-sized to tiny. A similar story goes for koalas. We have a koala couple. And another pair climbing one of our wattles. And there is even a learned fellow who reads a book. Considering we are supposed to be a kangaroo-themed garden, you could possibly say we are a bit over koala-fied. Aside from the marsupials, we’ve also got a wombat, and a…
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Having lived in Japan for decades, it’s suddenly strange to see the country become what seems to be the global flavor the month, particularly when it comes to the phenomenal interest in akiya, one of the millions of empty homes throughout the country. All of the photos in this post are of akiya on sale for less than 1 million yen, which is about A$10,000 at the time of writing, picked up off a site at random. Akiya has become a well-known word globally as people have become attracted by the prospect of owning real estate for a fraction of…
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Damn, life has been so serene recently, I have literally had to pinch myself to tug my mind back to reality. A mate dragged me back into the real world fiercely and abruptly today. And that was because the mate died. It was not completely unexpected. Some might say it was God’s will. He had come close before. And had survived multiple bouts of cancer. Vexastiously, things had spiralled downward this year, though. And maybe even futher back. I realized that even though we had shared some of the most intimate details of our lives on an almost daily basis…
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For various reasons, I got to look at YouTube for the first time in years this morning and, by sheer coincidence, got to see a video captured exactly 10 years ago to the day. The footage came from a fire that had broken out on the spectacular Rainbow Bridge, which links the Tokyo mainland (well, another reclaimed section) with the artificial island of Odaiba. I was working in the Yokoso Rainbow Tower, an exceptional work of architecture that reflected the flavor of the then-recently burst economic bubble when it was completed in 1995. I’d just finished my lunch break and…
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My hospital killed me, I learned today. It was part of a mix-up caused by our dinosaur (actually, it was my fault as I let her chew up my appointment reservation slip without noting any information that it contained, and then taking too long to follow up on it). Normally, every three months I go for a routine check-up to the hospital, where I have been receiving treatment for the past 15 years. I’d last visited in March, so knew I was due to go back again, and rang through during the week to book an appointment for this morning.…
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We’ve just had a wonderful weekend enjoying the pleasures of the Tama Hills Recreation Area, which combines luxurious quarters with wild, somewhat terrifying scenery reminiscent of what a world without humans might look like. It’s the latter that continues to delight me in the bi-annual visits we’ve been fortunate to make over the past decade or so, though such opportunities may about to draw to a close. We will enjoy them while we can, though. Related posts: CHAMPIONS! Tigers Premiers 2019 as Dimma’s Dynasty Does us Proud Where’s the Whist Amid the Wisteria? Wattle Day Winter is Here Awe-tumnal! Dekochari,…
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Australia is often referred to as “the lucky country,” which most people use favorably, but was actually a derogatory term coined by journalist Donald Horne in his book of the same name, and with April 25 a landmark date in Aussie history now called ANZAC Day, it got me thinking about fortune and the role it plays in lives. Australia had the misfortune to fight its first day of war as an independent, federated country on April 25, 1915, and thousands of young men were brutally mowed down in meaningless slaughter in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of World War I…