In Goo We Trust

In my recent wanderings two separate phenomena have caught my eye in the shop windows and on the roads of Japan. The first is the Goo Phenomenon, where the word "goo" is popping up attached to virtually everything. There's a home improvement store (like Home Depot or OSH) called GooDay. I can understand that maybe the 'd' in there serves to link the words "good" and "day", but then how do you explain the instant cup noodles I saw last week at one of my schools called "Noodle Goo!"? Or the Kawasaki motorcycle promotional event with posters of a bike and female model beneath the word "Goo!"? There's an auto parts magazine called "Goo" and a "Bike Goo" for motorcycles, even NTT's Yahoo!-esque homepage is called simply "Goo". And the list goes on... By the way, it's not short for "goods", as in goods and services--there's a separate spelling for that in katakana.

The next exciting tale of exciting mystery comes from the ass-end of Japan's many automobiles and all the time I've been spending behind the wheel lately. Japan would be a numerologist's wet dream judging by the incredible amount of coincidental license plates and no real explanation for them. I think it first came to my attention when Maia pointed out a 666 license plate a while back and sort of snowballed from there. Now I'm actively searching for weird numbers in plates and can be sure of finding them on what seems like every other car. Palindromes (ex. 54-45) and successive number (25-26) plates are the two most common, but the taboo 666 plate has also been spotted by us at least twice in recent weeks. What's odd about 666 is that I haven't seen any other triple-digit plates except that one. Ever. My little Honda "Cartrain" Logo's plate is 72-72...

So far the internet has turned up nothing on both phenomena, so it's time to pound pavement and talk to the man on the street about this. Someone's bound to know.

--Matt