tissue
Free kleenex. That's my favorite thing about Tokyo. It's everywhere, winter and summer, rainy and sunny days. No matter where you are, it's likely there is someone standing within three hundred yards of you getting paid to hand out tissue packets stuffed with advertising that no one will even look at.

I keep imagining the shelves of tissue in the drugstores, stacked with lonely boxes that no one buys for lack of wont of kleenex. But no, despite that anyone, like me, can fill a drawer with FREE kleenex without trying, people still shell out a few hundred yen for their very own "decorative" tissue. (If they were in it for, you know, the "quality" quilted or lotion varieties, I would understand, as the free tissue is of course of the lowest par.)

I weep at this consumer culture. I weep and I do no understand. For in Tokyo, all one has to do is hold out one's hands to recieve, even unasked, the offering of free kleenex. There should never be a nose in this city that is not dry!!!!

I LOOK UPON MY FREE KLEENEX AND I AM GLAD.