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When you have sequence of negative experience, sadness, madness, disappointment, failure, and etc. don’t you think you feel like blaming your fate?

When I was younger, I couldn’t stop comparing my life or myself with my friends’, although I knew that was completely nonsense. It just made me sad whenever I wondered why my family was not happy while my friend’s one was, why I was so bad at math, why I had less good friends, why, why, why…and that only tortured myself more and more…

This bad habit didn’t change even after I started working. Whenever I saw my colleagues’ good designs and cool ideas, I questioned myself “Was I able to come up with such an idea? No, I don’t think so…” and I was upset.

There’s no one who has only good things, and vice versa. That’s too natural to be told. Yes, I know. But I want that to be told from time to time. SInce most of Japanese people do not have religion, which however doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in whatever God, I think I sometimes want to listen to preaches from someone who has deep experience of his life.

Lately I read a book “Seifu no housoku (正負の法則)“. It means principle of positive and negative in this universe. And this book taught me something very interesting.

According to the author, Akihiro Miwa, anyone’s life is even with good things and bad things happening equally. One of the parts I found interesting was that if your life is too many good things so far, you’d better go for charity or something before bad things actually occur to you. If you just enjoy good things, you will have to have very bad things to balance your life, because that’s how life is supposed to be.

In that sense, he says if your life is so-so or OK, that’s considered good enough because you wouldn’t have very bad things to set off. People would envy beautiful, rich, popular and successful people, but they should have negative things to set off such positive things.
I thought that’s one of the reasons why celebrities or rich people make donation often, in order to set off their too many positive things.

My life has become something more relaxed since I stopped comparing.
This book also made me expect good things from so many bad things so far happened in my life.
What do you think? Have you heard of similar story?

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The other day, Lisa, one of my blog readers who also has lived and worked in Japan kindly introduced me an interesting blog that is written by a foreign Gyaru who lives in Tokyo now. This is it: Universal Doll

I think that some of my blog readers who are very much interested in fashion can enjoy her blog. In her blog, she mentions about a new magazine, “Shibuya 109 English Guidebook“. I also found another post about the magazine but is written in more objective way than hers.

If you are planning to visit Shibuya, which is the very center of Japanese Gyaru fashion and where 109 department building with full of Gyaru taste of fashion stores is located, it’s not a bad idea to give it a try. It’s also well-known that Hollywood celebrities and musicians love to drop at 109 when they visit Tokyo. I see how much they can get excited about kawaii fashion at cheap prices!

Shibuya 109 is a fashion department building especially targeted teens and young men and women. (It was not that much Gyaru-targeting atmosphere when I was a highschool student. That’s because I used to shop there often but I was not Gyaru at all then. Maybe Gyaru was not even popular then. ^ ^; ) The taste of fashion is Gyaru-kei for women, Onii-kei for men. (Gyaru-kei fashion for men) As is always, 109 is not exceptional. They open at 10 am and close at 9 pm. (Restaurants open 11 am to 10:30 pm.) They open everyday only except for 1st of Jan.

In case you are not familiar with Gyaru, here’s wiki for your reference. Also, let me put a video link here again, which you can also find at Universal Doll but is not played smoothly due to lack of memory or because she doesn’t use a self-hosting blog? I don’t know but anyhow it’s a Japanese TV show introducing foreign Gyaru in Shibuya, Tokyo.

“Yamanba” or “Manba” type of Gyaru is not so popular in Japan any longer. I rarely see them in Shibuya any more there days, but it’s a surprise to me this trend can be seen somewhere overseas…((-_-;))

As for myself, I have never been a Gyaru-type of girl and I have no interests in Onii-kei young guys but I don’t dislike them. I just feel awkward and out-of-place when I shop at 109 now, with my natural and casual way of looking among most of other shoppers who are totally “Gyaru” from top to the bottom. Pesonally I find Gyaru items are reasonable and cute. I think it’s good to enjoy fashion as much as we like while we are young. When we get old, we have so many other things to do and we cannot spare much time for it any longer…just like me now!

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	Alexander Optivions is multi-disciplined, multi-faceted artist. He is a writer, illustrator, musician and photographer. He has published a chilren book named “April Skullpop“. Here’s some introduction of the story. April Skullpop is the last sorceress in the kingdom of Doom-a-nia. On her birthday, she wakes up to find that her mother has disappeared. Meanwhile, the sorcery queen of Doom-a-nia has vanished the entire kingdom. April, with wand in hand, quests to follow her mother’s clues and protect herself against the Queen’s vindictive spell, while she is helped by her best friend. On the way to the Queen’s Doom Tower, she encounters obstacles, but she soon discovers that she alone can defeat the Queen and save her mother. She is a sorceress that possesses the spell of unwavering love and reflects the hidden magic in all of us. To learn more about April Skullpop, please visit http://aprilskullpop.com

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	Ruby Winkle is a tale about a young girl who tirelessly searches for sleep, and is authored and illustrated by Meghan Killeen. Ms. Killeen has some very unique background in her career. She attended the Art Institute of California in San Francisco and also became a certified English instructor. She worked for a detective agency and also performed in a circus troupe. She has now returned to the forest where she writes stories and makes characters continuously come alive. She currently works for an animation studio. I believe these various experiences in her life may have something to do with her creativity and fantasy to create a children book such as “Ruby Winkle”. Now let’s take a look at a little bit of the inside of “Ruby Winkle”! Ruby Winkle pursues an evasive night of sleep with her teddy bear companion, Garble. She’s comically making every effort to regain her loss of sleep. She also questions the supernatural possibilities of a monster and turns to the magic of hypnosis to aid her quest for rest. Ruby meets several characters who try to help her in their ways but after a sequence of ingenious attempts and trials, it is Ruby’s mother who offers the easiest suggestion for a night of zzz…s. To learn more about Ruby Winkle, please visit www.rubywinkle.com.

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I like browsing book stores to see what’s going on in our society, what’s up and what’s hot, etc…In this blog, I am mostly writing kawaii stuff, fun things, and nice experiences to share with my blog readers. But these days I feel like writing the dark side of Japanese society as well, since I receive emails from young people who are eagar to move to Japan in the future, being totally obsessed with kawaii culture. I know things are getting harder and harder in Japan due to economy recession that is strongly affected by the U.S subprime mortgage issue, especially since Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Japan is such a nation that is strongly supported by exporting business as represented by TOYOTA, too strong YEN causes critical damage to our market, economy, and our life in the end.

The other day, my eyes were caught by the book in the photo, saying “I become homeless today”. When I rougly read some pages, I found the people introduced in the book are originally working for a big named company and drawing a high salary. But something went wrong with them at some point in their life, which had quite a big effect from economy recession especially since last year. This book seemed to be published some time ago, but the reality spoken inside it is still “available” today.

Worst economy situation brings many homeless people, who try to make living by robbery, fraud, and murder. They never intended to be so. I just hope this darkest days will finally end and we recover from recession as soon as possible.

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