Featured on KISS Online

Yesterday morning I was watching the Japanese morning TV program 「めざましテレビ」  (“Mezamashi TV“) as I do every morning while I get ready for work…when suddenly KISS was on the show to promote their new album “KISS 40“!

Of course I took a photo of my TV screen and tweeted it.

It got many re-tweets. Even KISS‘s official twitter account re-tweeted my photo!

And, KISSonline.com, their official homepage, put my photo on the KISS site.

My photo on KISSonline.com

Thanks NaoKISS for telling me about it.

Six years

My blog here is six years old today. I started it on 2008 March 26th.

My blog has had 1,772,134 visitors so far. That averages to 820 visitors a day.

Thank you to everyone who visits and reads what I write! Especially if you leave a comment! Visitors’ comments are what makes blogging enjoyable…so please continue to leave comments often.

Tokyo Five on Twitter

Do you have a Twitter account?

I have just just using it.

My Twitter name is five_in_tokyo

Please follow my Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/five_in_tokyo

Leave a comment on this post and tell me if you’ve started following my tweets.

I’d be grateful.

The Boss meets the Emperor

First of all, today (2013 March 26) is the fifth anniversary of my blog.

I wrote the first post on 2008 March 26.

As of today, my blog has gotten about 1,600,000 hits … that averages to about 895 hits per day over the five years – – but that’s not really accurate because my blog averages 1000 hits a day now, but less than 50 a day when I first started it in 2008.

Thanks to all my site’s visitors … especially you! Please leave a comment!

Anyways, I found out about a new movie about post-WW2 Japan titled “Emperor” starring Tommy Lee Jones as U.S. Army General Douglas McArthur.

Do you know who Gen. McArthur was?

He is very well-known in Japan.

General McArthur was in charge of the U.S. military  during the war against Japan … and also during the occupation of Japan after the war ended.

Japanese people respect McArthur because he respected the Japanese people.

Tommy Lee Jones is also respected in Japan.
He is known to everyone here as the “face” of Suntory’s Boss Coffee.

  In the Boss Coffee TV commerials, Tommy Lee Jones acts and sounds like a Japanese man.
He’s an excellent actor.

Have you seen the movie “Emperor” ?

A million and a half

Today my blog has reached one-and-a-half million (1,500,000) visitors.

It gets an average of 1,400 visitors a day. (On my blog’s busiest day, it got over 10,000 hits!)

I appreciate everyone who visits my blog…especially if you leave a comment! The interaction is what makes blogging enjoyable…so, by all means, leave a comment often!

Just how big of a number is 1.5 million?

Well…1.5 million days, for example, is about 4,109 years!

Here’s an idea of what a crowd of 1.5 million people looks like:

There are an estimated 1.5 million people in this crowd of protestors (according to “Google Image” search).

Please answer my survey and let me know how often you visit my blog:

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Currency converter

I haven’t used American money for many years…so I don’t pay attention to the ¥en ←→ US$ exchange rate.

US dollars and Japanese Yen.

But I know that many foreign visitors in Japan like to know what the prices of things here equals in their home currency.
So, I just added a “Currency Converter” to my Smart-phone app.

Do you use my “Tokyo Five Smart-phone app“?

If you install it on your phone, you can enter a Japanese Yen amount in the Currency Converter and it will tell the equivalent amount in U.S. dollars.

There are many other useful features on the app too.

Click here to learn how to install the app.

If you install it…leave a comment here and let me know how you like it.

My blog’s in the “Top 4”!

According to “Blog Rank”, my blog here is the fourth biggest “Tokyo blog” ranked by Google!

It’s also the 13th biggest”Tokyo blog” as ranked by the number of incoming links, and the 39th biggest “Tokyo blog” overall.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my blog listed (three times) on their list.

New page

I just made a new page on my blog.
It’s titled “What’s that?“, and I made it to answer some of the questions that visitors ask me about “mysterious” things they’ve seen in Japan.

Check it out and if you have any questions about Japan (things you’ve seen, where places are, recommendations for places to visit, etc.), feel free to contact me. And, of course, comments in any of my blogs pages and posts are always appreciated!

One million hits

My blog reached one million hits yesterday! Thank you very much for visiting my blog…and I hope you’ll leave a comment often! The best part of having a blog is the feedback from visitors…so feel free to comment on any of my posts (recent ones, as well as old ones).

My blog averages about 1,500 hits a day. But the day with most traffic was just after the 2011 March 11 earthquake / tsunami in Sendai. My blog had 10,007 hits on that single day.

Just how big of a number is one million?
One million hours is over 114 years,
one million miles is more than four times the distance from the earth to the moon,
and
one million people is the approximate population of Sendai, Japan.

One million dots (each block in the picture has 10,000 dots!) ...(picture is from "schools.etacuisenaire.com")

Does spamming actually work?

My blog is hosted by, as you can probably tell by the URL, WordPress.
It’s an excellent service…and it’s completely free. If you’re considering writing a blog, I recommend using WordPress.

Among they’re many features is an excellent Spam filter.

Every once in awhile I check my “spam folder” and delete the comments in there from some unscrupulous companies trying to add links to their sites onto my blog.

These spam comments are obviously generated by a computer program that attempts to incorporate words and phrases related to my blog hoping to get past the spam filter.

I’d estimate that ninety-nine percent of their efforts fail.

But, I wonder, if their efforts are successful and they manage to get one of their ridiculous comments onto a blog, does it pay-off? Does anyone actually click on one of the links for “Viagara”, diet supplements or whatever else they attempt to traffic?

As an example, here are a few spam comments that were in my spam folder today. I deleted all of the links but left the “username” as they wrote it and I didn’t change any of the wording in the body of the comments.

They attempted to posts these comments on my blog’s “About Me” page.

Here they are (in red) with my reply to them (in black):

●　From: loseweight
Wow!! Nice post!

Really? My “About Me” page?

●　From: consolidateyourloan
What I dont recognize is how youre not even a lot more well-liked than you’re now. Youre just so intelligent. You know so considerably about this subject, made me think about it from so many diverse angles. Its like people arent interested unless it has something to do with Lady Gaga! Your stuffs great. Keep it up!

Well, thank you Mr. consolidateyourloan! Very nice of you to consider me “so intelligent”…but what makes you assume that I’m not as “well-liked” as I should be?

>You know so considerably about this subject

I’d hope so. Considering the “subject” of my “About Me” page.

●　From: celebrity Magazine
Between me and my husband we’ve owned more MP3 players over the years than I can count, including Sansas, iRivers, iPods (classic & touch), the Ibiza Rhapsody, etc. But, the last few years I’ve settled down to one line of players. Why? Because I was happy to discover how well-designed and fun to use the underappreciated (and widely mocked) Zunes are.

Mrs. celebrity Magazine, if you had used a more “conventional” username and hadn’t added links to obvious spam sites (which I’ve deleted), you could’ve added this comment to my post that I wrote about the popularity of the Walk-man in Japan (They’re popularity has been declining since I wrote that post, though. The I-pod is much more popular now.) or my post comparing the original Walk-man to the modern one instead of my “About Me” page and I would’ve assumed it was a legitimate comment.

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Do you have a blog? Do you get a lot of spam?
Do you get e-mail spam often? My current e-mail spam filters are as good as my blog’s…so, thankfully, I don’t get much email spam anymore.