Whilst shopping this salad caught my attention and then my imagination. I was first lured by the prospect of buying 99p`s worth of salady goodness for a mere 79p by the flurescent orange sticker on it. Looking a bit closer I noticed that it said "product of more than on country" on the front. I know lots of things these days are made around the world, for example my new DMs were made especially for me by some hard working bootsmith in China, but somehow the contrast of something having travelled from many parts of the world and it costing 79p and it being salad seemed to bring the madness all home to me. That wasn`t all though, another label on the front said "washed in spring water". Obviously my imagination led be to believe that each tender leaf had been lovingly washed on the side of a mountain in a natural spring which rises clear and crisp from the rock face of a cliff. But seriously, how anal do you have to be to insist that all the salad you consume must be washed in spring water instead of regular old plain water? bizzare... I couldn`t detect any difference in taste anyway. You`d have thought that someone who was so particular about salad being washed in spring water would have something to say about it being processed and sold in a little plastic (non-degradable) bag.

On another note, this from the Japan Times website:

Japan has roughly 22,000 lawyers -- one for every 5,790 people, compared with one for every 268 in the United States. Under the old bar exam, to be scrapped in 2011, fewer than 1,500 people are allowed to pass every year. In the United States, with about twice Japan's population, the number is closer to 75,000.