Unexpected

A letter I wrote is going to be published in the Sunday, July 30th edition of the Asahi Shinbun, which is something like the Japanese equivalent of The New York Times. I wrote the letter for a class as part of an assignment, and I have to admit I'm not that fond of it. But, I never would have imagined something I wrote would get printed in a Japanese newspaper, so it's pretty cool. I will not translate it into English unless faced with overwhelming demand to do so, which I do not expect to happen. On the other hand, with just a modicum of demand (say, a single e-mail or comment), I will post the original Japanese version for kicks if anyone wants to look at the pretty kanji characters.

Bonus!

This short film is hilarious. It's about 7 minutes long, so make sure you have time to watch the whole thing. And I will vouch for the general goodness of the subtitles. It strikes a good balance between not being overly literal and not taking too many liberties with the dialogue.

Oh Yes It Does

Well, considering that I got a comment asking whether or not this blog is dead, I figured I should post something. Plus, I found something awesome I'd been meaning to post forever.

I've been crazy busy here recently. I rocked the placement test at the beginning of this semester a little too hard, resulting in my classes becoming much more difficult. At the same time, I was doing lighting design for an underground theatre company that's about a 3 hour round trip commute away, and I made new friends on campus in addition to the ones I already had. Among other things.

Life is awesome here, and I am already feeling uneasy that I only have 2 months left. I don't mean to offend friends and family in America when I write this, but I have to admit that I really don't particularly want to go back.

I definitely hope to return here in the future.

I think things should be less hectic from here on out, and if this is indeed the case I'll try to resume posting on at least an irregular basis in my last couple months here to talk about some of the stuff I've been up to.

In any case, a while back I went to a bookstore and what I bought was put into the paper sack pictured below, whose design can only be described as (1) mindblowing and (2) not at all related to the decorations in the rest of the store:



How true, paper sack.

How true.

By the Way . . .

I heart Howard Zinn.

桜吹雪

I don't really see the point in living somewhere without sakura anymore.






These pictures do absolutely no justice to how beautiful they are. Spring in Japan is the platonic form of Spring, and all other Springs lacking sakura are nothing but pale imitations.

On windy days, the petals flit about like snow. At first, I thought that I was creative for mentally describing this phenomenon as a "snowstorm of flowers," and I was so amazed that I believed I had happened upon some sort of miracle of nature that very few are ever allowed to witness. However, the very next day I heard someone use the word "桜吹雪" (sakurafubuki), which literally means just that, "snowstorm of flowers." That this flower snowstorm has gone on for about a week now, in addition to fact that 桜吹雪 is not a metaphor in Japanese anymore but simply a regular old word you can look up in any dictionary, seems to indicate that these flower storms are a fairly regular Spring occurrence. I am literally looking out my window as I type this to see more flower petals than I could possibly count raining down from the sky.

The other effect of this that should have been obvious but surprised me nonetheless was that this rain of flowers results, from time to time, in the ground being carpeted in tiny pink and white and purple petals.

You Bet I Will

A friend of mine in the dorm who is graduating tomorrow asked me tonight if he could store all of his manga in my room, because he has too much of it to the extent that it's too troublesome to move it all to his apartment for the time being.

I think my answer to this favor masked as a request should be obvious.

I will indeed somehow bear the heavy burden of keeping all of my friend's manga for as long as is necessary. How will I ever cope with having thousands of pages of delicious comics at my fingertips for the foreseeable future?

Here is a completely unrelated picture of a cigarette vending machine in Nishi-Ogikubo.



Because it was there.

In Line for Food

I've neglected this site very badly as of late.

Here's a picture I rather like.



My favorite part about it is the lady in red who seems particularly disgruntled at my presence for some reason or another. Usually it is only people under the age of 7 or so who provide me with, "Who is that white guy?" looks that are this precious.

Two things to note here:

1) The tiny dog. There are so many tiny dogs here.

2) The masks. People wear them when they are sick.

Pithy Observation

Japanese kids into the hip music tend to use the terms "post-hardcore" and "post-rock" just about as often as they use "emo." And, yes, they do indeed talk about music genres pretty much entirely using English loanwords. I thought it might have just been the people I first talked about music with, but as I meet more and more people it has become clear that it is everyone. Make of this what you will. Or, just be totally confused by what it even means at all, depending on who you are.

Hot Diggity

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.

This bit of needless ego inflation was provided by this article.