A much more pedestrian dining experience, a fast food type noodle shop in Harajuku. The sign is there to instruct foreigners on the proper protocol - noodles you slurp with chopsticks from a bowl held at a convenient height, I have no idea what the middle one depicts, and you eat rice balls and dessert with your fingers. The expressions on the cartoon faces certainly convey how much better the food is even in the standard hole-in-the-wall than in a comparable American greasy spoon or fast food place. The counter staff have a different psychic posture than they do in American fast food places, too. The pay discrepencies between rich and poor are much narrower in Japan than in the US, and the stigma of service jobs isn't quite as severe, perhaps because there are few immigrants or people of color to do the burger-flipping-equivalent. Nobody in the fast-food places or the fish market or wherever looked any happier than the executive types etc, of course, but they didn't seem too much more miserable either, at least to a casual observer.

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