Meguro City in Tokyo takes disaster survival seriously! When you become a resident of Meguro City you are issued with the Disaster Survival Manual. The manual, using subtle semiotics, describes how to “handle” your fire extinguisher in the event of fire. The important point to learn is ‘Step 2′, that is, the best way to combat those raging flames is to make sure that you hold the fire extinguisher as if you were in the starring role of a porn movie.

So the question is, when fighting fires what matters most? The size of your hose or the way that you use it?

The seventh Rugby World Cup kicked off in New Zealand today and I can’t think of a better way to mark the commencement of this sporting spectacle than to recollect from the retro video archives the cool ad from the 2003 Rugby World Cup featuring popular ex-Wallaby John Eales taking on the Japanese train crammers as he tries to board a crowded train in Tokyo. The ad, embedded below, was part of Visa’s advertising campaign launched for the 2003 Rugby World Cup and is a parody of the Japanese train crammers who are renowned for wearing white gloves and stuffing people into already crowded trains.

After rushing through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo and paying for his train ticket with Visa, an airport bound “Ealsy” gets to the train but is confronted by a carriage overflowing with people. Noticing the overpowering white-gloved train crammers at the other end of the carriage stifling the ability of the commuters at his end of the train from boarding he uses his Rugby prowess to pack a scrum with fellow commuters that overwhelms the push of the white-gloved train crammers helping to pack more people through his train doors and eventually squeezing himself in too.

The soundtrack to the advertisement is Turning Japanese, possibly the most misinterpreted song of all time! Released in 1980, it is the second single by the band The Vapors and is popularly interpreted to be a euphemism for masturbation as it is believed to euphemistically refer to the face a male makes during the act of masturbation.

When the brutal humidity of a sultry Japanese summer starts to pack a punch and you struggle to endure the sweltering heat trapped in your energy-conserving office or crammed on a crowded peak hour train, it’s time to unwind pool side at Tokyo Summerland where you can have a relaxing splash in the peaceful tranquility of their abandoned wave pool. Hurry now whilst there is still space in the pool in the upper left corner.

Don’t forget to check out the Mexican wave pool action in the embedded video below.

Image source: JapanTrends

Fist bump to Loco in Yokohama for shining the bat-signal from the rooftop of his blog in his call for submissions to the Summer 2011 edition of Hot Fun in the Summertime! He rocked the house with the Summer 2010 edition with a groove so funktagious that he is here to do it all again. Check out my submission from last year: Beers, beaches and bikinis.

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