Miscellaneous things about Tsukuba and Japan (7)

Time for the 7th installment of "Miscellaneous things about Tsukuba and Japan". I never thought that I'd be able to continue this series for so long, but there seems to be more things qualified for this series the longer I live here. I'm going back next week though, so this might be the final or the penultimate post in this series.

How many types of Lawson are there?
This is not really anything special or strange, but it just that I had seen three different "type" of Lawson shops in one day.

The standard "Lawon Station" 

"Happy Lawson" with a playground for children inside

A 100 yen store by Lawson

Wi-Fi on trains
The Tsukuba Express offers Wi-Fi service on its trains. Normal internet access is a paid service where you need an account with a major service provider, however, the "wifine" access point offers free access to news, horoscope, the Tsukuba Express's website (for schedule) and also access to the Nintendo Zone.

"Wifine" service

LCD Price Tags
The Kasumi supermarket near the Tsukuba station uses LCD price tags for the entire store. While I'm not sure about the economics of it, it surely is interesting.

ISDN Connection at public phones
In Japan, public phones come in 2 variants - the green phone is an analog line while the grey phone is a digital ISDN line. The grey phone apparently has a "data comm" function which allows users to connect a computer (modem) to the phone and use it for data transfer. However, with the ubiquity of mobile network and Wi-Fi, I doubt anyone uses it now.

Longer travel is... cheaper?
Train pricing in Japan can be sometimes confusing. Look at the pricing map below, the arrow points to our starting station. Suppose you are to travel on the Yamanote loop (the green circle), the price goes like this: 130, 150, 160, 190, 160. What? It's cheaper to travel further?

The truth is that in Tokyo, train pricing is always calculated based on the cheapest path no matter what train you actually took (there are actually certain rules saying what longer routes you can and cannot take, but as long as the route is reasonable, you should be fine). So the shortest way to the other side of the loop is to use the red line in the middle, and so the fare is calculated based on that. However, you might want to take the Yamanote instead so that you don't have to change train.

Emergency phone chargers
Ran out of juice on your smartphone and you really need it, what should you do? In Japan, you can simply walk to the nearest convenient store and spend a thousand yen on an "emergency charger" that will feed your phone from 2 alkaline batteries. Of course, this should be reserved for emergency, since it is not environmental or wallet friendly.

An emergency charger on sale at Family Mart