I thought the photo below was particularly poignant to me.

This is a photo of a billboard that sits above the main exit of the Shibuya JR station. The patch of rectangles in the middle of the billboard is a QR code — essentially, a 2-D barcode.

This is poignant for a few reasons. This is the first time I’ve seen a major advertisement installation like this where one of the most prominent features of the advert is a machine-readable only data format. This has the feel of one of those “Animatrix” motifs where machines have gained a first-class citizenship alongside humans — just a little bit eerie to see a piece of very expensive advertising real estate occupied by a data format that my wetware cannot natively process. The QR code on the billboard actually encodes a URL for the band’s website. In the US, this would have to be a text URL. But, in Japan, every mobile phone — at least the ones used by the sub-40 demographic (the dominant population of Shibuya) — has built into it a QR barcode image recognition program. Since every Japanese mobile phone has a camera built into it, and they all have QR barcode software in it, it’s entirely reasonable to put data that is exclusively machine-readable on expensive advertising real estate. I tried the QR code out on my Japanese cell phone and it worked wonderfully.

This leads to the second reason why this is poignant. While the Japanese system may have many flaws, the massive uniformity of the mobile phone feature set has as one of its benefits the ability to drive pervasive new standards like the QR code into just about everything — from QR codes embedded in vending machines for coupon distribution, to QR codes embedded on the wrapper of a MacDonald’s cheeseburger to give rapid access to a URL for nutrition facts.

Normally, when you think about Japanese cuisine, you think about Sushi — or maybe Ramen, if you are like me. One of the things you wouldn’t expect to find in Japan is a diversity of boutique gourmet burger shops — but there is! While on my vacation in Japan, I decided to take a couple of days and scope out some of the best burger joints in Tokyo.

My favorite so far is Zats Burger Cafe. As far as I can tell, they only have a few locations around Tokyo. I’ve only eaten an the location just outside the west exit of the Yoyogi JR station, but every burger they have there is masterfully crafted and some of their recipes are quite creative. My favorite burger is shown below, the avocado cheeseburger.

A picture of the grill at Zat’s is shown below.

Watching them make the burger is a lot of fun. Their grill master and burger dresser has all the skill and precision of a sushi chef. For the avocado burger, they cut an avocado in half, remove the seed, and slap a teaspoon of butter into the hole. They then drop this onto the grill flat-face down, adding a little teriyaki sauce along the way. As the avocado grills and develops a beautifully charred surface, they are also preparing the meat and the bun to perfection. The result is a wonderfully tasty burger with a texture and character that is unforgettable.

Their signature burger, the “sasebo burger”, is also very tasty, but it has a lot going on. Perhaps my Californian background has caused me to have a disposition toward avocado burgers.

An honorable mention is Pakuch! burger. Aside from having a cute logo (see below), their burger is a veritable tower.

This burger shop is near the Shibuya station, although I don’t remember the exact directions to it — I seem to remember it is somewhat north of the station. The burger is, as you would expect, a huge mouthful. The patty meat is well done, although I feel like the burger didn’t quite have the same soul as the Zat’s burger had.

The other two standbys that I visited were Mos burger and Freshness burger. The Mos burger store that we visited had a chalkboard that talked about all the ingredients that they were using that day, along with the name of the farmer or vendor that sold the ingredients to that store. Freshness burger, in my mind, is still the OG gourmet burger chain for Tokyo, as I have been eating their burgers since the mid-90’s when I first went to Tokyo.

Above is a photo of a Freshness burger.

The Japanese do make one mean burger. All of these burgers were better than say, the In-n-out burger that is quite popular on the US west coast region. Leave it to the Japanese to improve on something as American as a fast food cheeseburger…even the MacDonald’s cheeseburger in Japan has a superior quality to those prepared in the US.