I know my recent posts haven’t been the happiest but I think those of you who are interested in Japan would like to know that things are back to normal and the stress of the triple disasters (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear leaks) have melted away…at least where I am concerned.

Today I uploaded a video for my Beauty Box TV channel because I have been bombarded with many questions about Tokyo after the Mar 11 so I thought a video would be a much better way to address these concerns.

Here, I answer FAQs about radiation (or lack thereof) in Tokyo, whether it is appropriate to travel here, and if life is back to normal. Tokyo is back to her gorgeous, amazing self and you should come visit. Help Japan by coming here and spending your money so our economy can flourish again.

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Yes, we all know that being your own boss is great. I’ve read so many blog posts and articles about working for yourself and all the perks: flexi-time, you answer to no one, and you make all the decisions. Cool, your self-esteem is rockin’ and you’ll never go back to slaving for someone else.

But how about the process of switching your mindset from being a life-long employee to boss lady? What’s that like? Is it easy?

I’ll like to come out and say that it wasn’t a situation that fit me like a glove from the get go. I had to work to feel good about it; to feel that it is my natural state of being.

+ It felt quite scary in the beginning and it still is sometimes. I always liked having a fixed salary so I could plan my finances. My e-biz is doing well for such a fledgling but I still don’t pay myself a salary, which means I live by the seat of my pants most days. The upside is you realize what is truly important to you on a day-to-day basis and that a person doesn’t need all that much

+ “I have my own company” means very different things to those who haven’t got one. I would say most people are impressed when I tell them I have my own business and they immediately assume I must be rolling in it or be very smart. I’m not either — finances are tight till I have fully expanded Beauty Box into the US; and I’m just an ordinary gal who had to earn some cash asap when I was left unemployed in a foreign country. But it feels good when people are in awe and I don’t apologize for it at all.

+ I didn’t let myself enjoy the so-called flexi-hours I had though I became the mistress of my time. In order to feel I was super efficient, I forced myself to be in front of the computer for 8 – 9 hours a day at least. It even felt good to go beyond those hours because I was working on my “baby” and I realized I needed the feeling of productivity to be optimistic. The weird thing was when I felt a short lapse occasionally and twiddled my thumbs a bit, I felt guilty for not drumming up enough things for myself to do.

Now, I work less but when I do, I am very focused. Though I’m haven’t reached a 4-hour work-week, I fully appreciate that I have time to exercise, learn Japanese, run errands during office hours or chat with a friend at mid-day. The best bit is when I can give myself a “personal day” when I just don’t feel like I’m firing away. I read blogs, take walks, hoop, or watch TV if I feel unproductive. It’s kind of like writer’s block: walk away when you can’t and come back when you can.

Having said that, I still operate on a pretty fixed routine because you just can’t accomplish anything if you don’t set aside time to get work done.

+ I’m not a natural-born leader but I’ve learnt to make decisions quickly and firmly. I still get butterflies in my stomach when I need to execute what feels risky. “What if it fails?” is a whisper I hear sometimes but I squash these thoughts and bide my time patiently. I have the kangaroo for support as my partner so being the sole decison-maker is not something thrown completely on my shoulders.

+ The solitude of working from home bothered me as I liked being part of a team. Then on hindsight, I was never close to anyone in the workplace because I was in journalism. Journalists are solo agents who fight for their bylines and I always felt you could trust no one. So the idea of having colleagues evaporated from my consciousness. You may not need colleagues but you still need people.

I honestly felt a bit depressed working in a space that was both my sanctuary and my office 24/7 without talking to anyone for long stretches of time. Imagine not speaking to a human being in person for 7 days straight — you would feel out of sorts and your social manners may get a bit rusty.

It has taken me a while to strive for a balance between work and play as finances are always my top priority. Though I’m still not as socially active as I’ll like to be, I’m getting there slowly but at the same time I’m definitely liking my own company much more these days.

So what I’ve learned from this transition of worker bee to queen bee is that anybody can be their own boss and you should never feel you are not good enough to create your own gig.

You don’t always need a lot of money to kick things off nor a whole lot of expertise in any field. I think the most important things to have before you take the plunge are: a great idea and a lot of balls to do it. Don’t think too much, just roll up your sleeves, and do it.

Photo credits: here, here, & here.

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The kangaroo was very excited when he saw this a couple of days ago.

He was like, “Babe, you gotta take a photo of your first big delivery from Tokyo!”

It’s not that big at all but it does feel good to be making headway. I read somewhere that owning your own business makes you go through a lot of highs and lows emotionally — I totally agree. There were days I fretted about cash flow and others about supply, but all good stresses to have overall.

What I get a kick out of it is that trying to grow something which is out of your own sweat and tears gives a renewed purpose to waking up every morning. It’s such a cliché but it’s true. I never got that excited writing about sex in a previous job.

Since October, my mother has been handling the Singapore side of things, while I take care of international orders, which is slowly increasing as the weeks go by. I’m surprised to know that collagen powder is quite a universal product with both Asian and Western women.

I’ve had orders mostly from North America which was kind of the last place I’d expect to get business — I had the impression that collagen was consumed in pill form or used in cosmetic surgical procedures only. Would any of my America readers shed some light on this?

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Just a small announcement to get some support for the Tokyo edition of Metblogs. I just started as a blogger for them because I saw there was a call for writers back in August — I stumbled upon it through another blog in late October, so I sent my application in to try my luck. They liked what they saw in Lioness in Japan, so here I am blogging about Tokyo at Metblogs.

If you are interested in following my posts, you can look at my sidebar under “Find Me” and you will see the links to the posts I’ve written there.

For those of you unfamiliar with Metblogs, it’s a blog network for cities all over the world, from London to Melbourne. You could kind of see these blogs as a way to get to know a city better but not treading the way of sanitized stuff from travel guides.

You’re probably wondering how similar or different it would be from LIJ. Well, this is my personal blog so it would still be about my life in Japan from my perspective as a Singaporean/trailing partner/business owner expat, and I would veer off on topics close to my heart. But my articles on Tokyo Metblogs will be a little bit more newsy — Japanese culture, trends, social issues, fun things to do in the city, cool bars and restaurants to check out, and anything endearingly “Tokyo”.

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As readers of this blog know, I was a magazine journalist back home. With recent events in my life, I’ve been doing a lot of reflection on the past and what I want out of the future in my career.

While I was leafing through my memories, I stumbled upon my my two-year stint at a certain women’s magazine. Besides travel and technology, I wrote articles about sex and relationships fairly regularly.

At the time, another colleague took the column on products and trends, while I did the special sex supplements and at least one or two articles about relationships per month.

I was teased by friends that I was a “Carrie Bradshaw”, but honestly, I felt there was nothing chic or fabulous about my job. Imagine this: I lived in a country where blow jobs were illegal between consenting adult men and women till Oct 2007. And being a sex columnist doesn’t seem easy in other more liberal countries, either.

Here’s why it was hard.

Writing about sex gets mundane. If you look at the human body, there are only so many orifices, and seriously, is the average person that flexible?

Sure, I think if you let your imagination run wild, you could probably drum up some jaw-dropping stuff, but with a magazine in a country such as our little red dot, we had to write stuff that was within taste and bounds of our famously strict media authority. So, you really have very little to play with, in terms of story ideas.

There were no sexy freebies. Many friends would nudge and wink at me (and the kangaroo) about getting to try all sorts of sexy contraptions. Reality check: Sex shops in Singapore are not glamorous flagship stores and they are dinghy out-of-the-way holes trying to make a buck.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this means they always wanted their products back after our photo shoot and with the seals on. I could only work my imagination on what mysterious powers these sex toys had.

I couldn’t do much empirical research. It was hard to experiment when the kangaroo was living in another country, so it was really like armchair travelling (which, by the way, many travel writers do — that’s another myth debunked. Sorry, guys!).

I was scared my ultra-conservative parents would find out. I never admitted this to my folks, nor did they ever confront me, but I never told them I wrote raunchy articles for my job and I wanted to keep it that way.

I had some fervent hope that, even if any of my relatives picked up a copy of the magazine I worked for, they would be too embarrassed to take the gossip back to my parents. Since I got free copies, my mother never felt the need to get them herself and I didn’t bring home the ones that had my byline on sex stories.

It was exhausting. Once, I did a tame article on the best hotels for a sexy weekend getaway, which was a relief from thinking up of incredible headlines (“Experience 30 orgasms in one night!”) and finding the sex books that actually made such claims. But little did I know that most reputable (and sexy) Singaporean hotels didn’t really want to be associated with the label “sex”.

After I convinced 10 hotels to participate, I hopped from one to another within three days. I did not “test” any of them, even though the kangaroo was in town, because I had like friggin’ 10 hotels to tour and 10 hospitality managers to interview in 72 hours.

In the end, I fell sick but went to work on the following Monday anyway, and turned lobster red when my editor quipped, “How was your sexy weekend getaway? Did you bounce a lot on the beds?” I actually felt embarrassed admitting I didn’t grope the kangaroo even though we were given a free night’s stay in three hotels.

It got technical. Have you tried breaking down pole dancing moves on paper? It’s not fun. It’s like describing exercise stretches or yoga poses.

Newsmakers were shy. No one wants to wash their dirty laundry in public and it was like pulling teeth to get saucy quotes. Generally, people just want to keep their private lives private.

Oh, and while our bookstores were happy to stock many sex books, they refused to be featured in the magazine, because it was not “aligned with [their] company policies”, so I couldn’t loan them for photo shoots or research. Alas, I spent many hours browsing sex manuals standing up in an aisle.

I felt like a fraud. I was no virgin but I was just your average gal who had her fair share of men. What did I know about sex and relationships? Nothing! But I had to write like I owned it and made having sex (lots of it!) an ambition — sort of like how Brothers & Sisters makes married sex look so hawt.

I wrote convenient tips and put up a dressing window on having a great sex life with these awesome frisky ideas (not that I don’t have a great sex life but regular people don’t put it out there, you know… and the kangaroo might be reading this).

By the way, I lied when I said the Frog was a great position to try. When I did get a chance to squeeze in some empirical testing, this didn’t rock the kangaroo’s boat. Not at all. Why? I was desperate and the positions were sent for illustration even before I could write the piece. There, I feel much better.

Direct references to sexual acts and body parts were verboten. Yes, you read that right. Do you know how difficult it is to find metaphors for penis, vagina, and intercourse? Schlong, d***, tool were also not allowed. I remembered “equipment” bypassed the cutting board at the editor’s desk, while my memories are tainted with resentful frustration that I had so many limitations.

Does that sound too vanilla to you? How did the sex column survive? It actually thrived — every time there was a special sex issue, the circulation numbers went ballistic. So instead of its annual appearance, the sex issue was slated to come out twice a year! Well, that was three to four years ago, so maybe things have changed.

I think we fell back on making it look chic with sleek images and full of cool alliterations. Basically, most stories could get away with it if you kept to the above-stated rules in my last point.

And the editors had this crazy idea to “seal” it, like it was so “hot”, it had to come with perforated edges. While it placated anxious parents of teenage daughters (like they wouldn’t know how to rip paper?), it made the curious even curiouser.

…Then there were sensational stories like orgies in HDB flats and a married man’s quest to bonk all the maids in his block, which actually sold thousands and thousands of copies. I think those were the articles that really reeled the readers in.

Maybe it doesn’t take much to shock the average Singaporean? Who knows, we are not the most liberal nation around, but we’re certainly not the most uptight.

Apparently, we are not romping rabbits in the sack either. A few years ago, there was some dismal statistic published by Durex that Singaporeans had one of the most infrequent sex in the world and was only just above the Japanese who were at the bottom — how can that be possible? Japan screams sex everywhere!

[Just an aside: In 2007, the Japanese only had sex 34 times a year on average (still the lowest globally), but Singapore got it up to 62 times annually, beating the UK (55) and the US (53). I guess the subprime crisis also wreaked havoc in the bedroom…]

One thing of interest to note is the media industry goes through waves of tolerance and intolerance. I think magazines and newspapers try to push the boundaries, and if they get a slap on the wrist (like a written warning from the media authority), they just retreat and stop publishing such torrid stuff — for a while. Like six months.

There you have it, if you ever consider putting down “Sex Columnist” as a career aspiration, you might want to think again…

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It’s almost midnight in Tokyo and the apartment is super silent — I had a very full and noisy pad for a week and I kind of miss that. But back to the grind and a thousand apologies for not publishing interesting posts. I will soon though!

I’ve just stocked up on some products for the month of November. Check out BB’s new Kose, DHC, and Fancl products here. Happy shopping!

I need to give a special mention to Dr Hagiwara’s Premium Barley Green Powder and Unicity’s Super Chlorophyll Powder which are on sale at Beauty Box: I’ve been taking a tsp of both in a glass of cool water daily since I was 20 (it’s been 10 friggin’ years!) and I must say I can’t do without this green blend.

Admittedly, this “sludge” (as the kangaroo calls it) doesn’t taste that great and is probably similar to wheatgrass in flavour, but this potent mix has helped me stave off terrible skin disorders (acne and eczema) and various allergies. Why not share the goodness?

Beauty is not skin-deep and it starts from within. You can’t put junk in your body and expect your skin to look great. It’s the blueprint of what’s going on internally so treat yourself right.

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It’s really too early to tell what effect another blog would have on my ever-growing stable of blogs, but I decided to take the plunge and launch a blog on Livejournal as a way to talk about beauty tips, tricks, and raves from an ordinary girl’s perspective.

Well, it’s also another avenue to promote and create awareness for my blog shop, Beauty Box, by tapping into the LJ community which is seriously a whole other blog universe on its own.

I’m no make up expert but I do love my products so I feel enthused about having a girly blog to indulge my vanity. When I was writing lifestyle and features columns for magazines back in Singapore, I always secretly wished I was in the beauty department but felt I didn’t meet the style quota. Anyway, here’s my own corner to fulfill that desire and chat about what I love in my powder room right here in Japan.

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Beauty Box is having a pre-order spree for Fancl products — prices are 15% off retail prices. The deadline for submitting orders is November 15, Friday.

For more details, click here.

Please help spread the word to your friends who are Fancl fanatics. Thanks!

Join Beauty Box’s Facebook group here

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My heart feels heavy right now — I just returned from my meeting with the social insurance people who explained the process of collecting unemployment pay.

I know this is a good thing because it’s some financial support in lieu of being retrenched and you can’t say no to such help. But it felt like a very sad day although I was more than prepared for it. I just wanted to get over with it and take the cash. Honestly, I had no emotions whatsoever and practical issues were only on my mind.

Although I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Nakamura, our colleague in the Tokyo office, I somehow could relate to his despair today. The kangaroo and I joke about his neurotic behaviour but for once I could see beyond that side of him.

Nakamura has a family — a wife and two little girls — to take care of but he told the kangaroo he made a killing during the bubble economy and he dabbled quite a bit in stocks and shares over the years. “So how soon do you need to look for a job?” asked the kangaroo, thinking he should do the decent thing and point Nakamura to a few potential roles.

“Oh, I don’t need to work for maybe five years,” declared our salaryman. The kangaroo wasn’t so worried about him after that.

But earlier on in the day, Nakamura had a “terrible” meeting with the lawyer, the accountant, and a disgruntled client who was demanding what they were due, plus the unexpected instructions from the Sydney office via the lawyer in Japan to shut down the Japan office officially. It is a protracted process to wind contracts down so we were told that the end date was to be in December, but it seems it was pushed forward with little warning. I have no solid idea on what is going on as I only get snippets from the kangaroo who is busy in New York and has no clue either.

Nakamura looked really sad after the social insurance people left the office and I felt compelled to ask him what were his plans. He said he wanted to find another job but the economy looks pretty bleak for now and he didn’t feel optimistic about finding one soon.

Technically, he doesn’t need a job but he wants to work anyway. He was left very much to his own devices (kind of like me, I guess) because his boss wasn’t around to hold him by the hand. He was obviously in a role far from his ideal and needed a group of colleagues or a semblance of a team to feel like he was part of a “real job”. Some people aren’t comfortable being alone and paving the way for themselves — and Nakamura is one of such people. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or wrong, but it was certainly one of his weaknesses in this context. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I wonder if it’s mine.

I sensed his aloneness and helplessness in the small, dingy office. We all need some kind of identity and belonging that no amount of money, in which way form, can soothe this feeling of being cast adrift and the shame of bankruptcy is a stain hard to wash off.

Maybe I’ve had too many Valerian pills lately but my eyes welled up when we said goodbye. His slumped shoulders somehow made me feel very mournful and lost, too.

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After dealing with a sleepless night, I staggered out of my futon like a bear with a sore head. I think it was the umeshu (plum liquor) I had last night at dinner and I was maybe feeling a little stressed about getting things done, so I watched several episodes of Brothers & Sisters till 4am.

But at midday, as I went through my RSS reader, I clicked on ProBlogger.net, blogging evangelist Darren Rowse’s blog about blogging tips, and saw that Lioness in Japan was featured on his post today, Reflections on 48 Hours of Inviting Readers to Comment ‘Spam’ My Blog.

Okay that title doesn’t sound very positive so let me give you some background to this story. Over the weekend, Darren put up a post to call his readers to pitch their blog in 140 words or less (very much in the vein of Twitter). He did that to create something for bloggers who want to publicise their blogs in his space because he constantly gets requests to give links to other bloggers, to which he almost always turns down. Fair enough, in my opinion. If it’s not related to the content, sorry it can’t happen.

So to round up that little exercise, he blogged about his thoughts on the overwhelming response he got and that this was an amazing case of an effortless post that went viral in ballistic proportions. Then he also included 10 of his favourite blog pitches, amongst which my pitch was mentioned. The kangaroo mused it had to do with the Aussie kangaroo connection since Darren is from Melbourne.

Here’s my pitch:

About a lioness travelling with a big kangaroo round the world. Right now, we are feeding at a watering hole called Tokyo – Lioness in Japan

Should I change my present blurb to that instead?

As I mentioned before, I have a personal policy of leaving a valuable comment if I read through an entire post. Not only do I get a link back to any one of my blogs, it’s also my way of trying to be part of that blog’s community. It is a long and arduous process, like any kind of relationship building, but it definitely has its pay-offs.

It may be a tiny victory in the big scheme of things but I can tell you that I have a pep in my step today because it feels like I’m making some significant headway.

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