TheLeong.com

Japanese TV for the most part is pretty bad. Right now the only shows that I am watching with at least some regularity are: Tadano Hitoshi on Friday nights, Kamen Rider Den-O usually downloaded, and Lincoln on Tuesday nights. They are, respectively, a drama about a badass corporate special agent, a kids superhero show, and a variety show with a bunch of famous comedians. The majority of the rest of Japanese TV is either news, bad dramas, or celebrities eating food and/or watching videos (often of other people eating food). This all means that when you need some audio visual entertainment at home, DVDs and the internet are invaluable. I brought over quite a few DVDs, including all of Arrested Development and 4 seasons of News Radio. I don’t want to know how many times I’ve watched those over and over. Anyways, I still watch quite a lot of TV, and also play a somewhat decent amount of video games in my free time. Today I figure I will share with you details on TV Links and Discas, two of the main ways I entertain myself with arguably meaningless visual entertainment.

First up is a recent goldmine of a site introduced to me by Mr. Nicholas Roberts. It is called, simply, TV Links (link). While it is very easy to explain what the site does, it is hard to express how amazingly useful and fun it is as a resource to watch a bunch of TV shows online. This is cool in itself, but when you are an American TV addict living in a country whose broadcast content contains mostly people eating and saying how good it is, cool becomes absolutely pants-wetting wonderful. While the videos are pretty much all hosted on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion, meaning the quality isn’t so great, the selection of shows and episodes makes up for it. TV Links does an excellent job of rounding up entire seasons and series into one handy place. You could watch a bunch of TV shows all the way through with this site. I’ve already watched a lot of Robot Chicken on there, as well as a ton of Seinfeld episodes. It’s a great site to waste a lot of time on. In addition to a great number of TV dramas, sitcoms, and reality shows, they also have a ton of cartoons and even Japanese anime shows. They even have Captain N!

I also started using the Tsutaya Discas service this year (link). It’s an online-to-postal DVD rental service, similar to Netflix in the states. While I’ve been able to get a lot of DVDs for uh…backup purposes, and it’s still a really good service, there are a few things that keep Discas from being as amazingly awesome at Netflix was when I was using it last year. With Netflix, for about 20 bucks a month I was able to get 3 DVDs at a time, automatically sent to me as I returned them. Netflix had a good queue system that automatically sent movies to me as soon as others were returned. Discas works a bit differently. There are two main plans you can choose from, with many other variations of these two. The one I’m on, called the M plan, gives you unlimited movies, 2 at a time, for 2079 yen a month. That’s about the same price as my old Netflix plan, although you get only 2 discs at a time. However, the main complaint I have with this plan is that while you can have a list of DVDs to rent, they don’t automatically send anything. You have to manually select which movies are sent to you via the website every time. Also the other pain is that you don’t have priority over other users to get movies. If a movie is very popular and checked out a lot, for example, then you can’t check it out. You can wait until maybe one comes back and have it sent to you, I suppose, but usually I try to get movies sent as soon as they receive my last ones, meaning I never wait for a certain movie to get in stock. Still though, I have been able to get a lot of movies and am filling up my 100 yen shop plastic storage boxes like never before. The price really isn’t bad either, considering the cost of DVDs in Japan (most movies cost at least 3000 or 4000 yen new), and the slightly expensive cost to rent movies at a regular brick-and-mortar. I wasn’t inclined to buy DVDs in the states, so you can’t expect me to do it in Japan.

The other plan that Discas offers, which is labeled as their most popular, is called the A plan. This one lets you queue movies, gives you priority, and even sends movies to you automatically. All this for 1974 yen; a lot different than the M plan I’m using, right? True, but the catch is that you don’t get unlimited rentals. There is a monthly limit of 8 discs. While this would be good for people who are renting just to watch movies every weekend, or casual renters who would usually stop by the video shop on the way home from work, this doesn’t really cut it for someone who will rent and backup movies with no intention of watching them for months. Oops. Overall, Discas is a good service and I’m definitely getting a lot of movies cheaper and more conveniently than if I would go to the actual video store. Just like Netflix, they send you movies in an envelope that converts into the postage-paid return envelope, thus you pay no shipping. A bit different is that they send you two at a time. Total time for shipping is about a day or two max either way, so I’m usually able to get around 2 or 3 shipments a week. Also, it’s interesting to note that while you send your movies back to Discas via the national postal service, they are actually sent to you by a courier (Sagawa Express, to be exact). I read a while back that it is actually cheaper in Japan now to send letters by one of the many private courier companies rather than by the post office. Interesting indeed.

Discas, being run by Tsutaya, the Japanese equivalent of Blockbuster, has a really good stock of movies, including American/other foreign ones, and their system works pretty well. I don’t like how every day their website seems to be under maintenance for an hour or two around 10AM, since this is the time I am waking up and getting ready to go to work, and is also when I would usually confirm some new movies to be sent to me. They also offer “Spot Rentals,” meaning you can override your monthly plan and limits, priorities, etc to rent a movie on the spot. You have to pay about an extra 500 yen, but it gets sent right to you, and is very comparable to going to a store and renting, especially considering you an get new releases.

If you’re living in Japan and want to give Discas a shot, they offer a free trial. I think you can try the M plan for two weeks, or you can try the A plan for a month.

It’s half past 1 in the morning on Monday night, and I just watched the Prince (or whatever he’s called now, that hieroglyphic thing?) halftime show for Super Bowl XLI. That’s right, Nippon TV, channel 10, is airing the Super Bowl here in Japan. It started a bit after midnight, which of course isn’t the greatest of time slots, but since I can’t imagine anyone in Japan is watching this except for Americans, I guess you can’t be picky. I already knew that the Colts won, since when I woke up this morning and checked Facebook and AIM away messages, pretty much everyone had something about it. I didn’t mind the spoiler. It’s not like I’m especially a huge American football fan, but I usually try to at least watch the Super Bowl. Actually, the last football game I actually watched was last year’s Super Bowl, but that makes sense because I’ve pretty much been in Japan since August.

I am primarily watching the game with the original English play-by-play, but it’s interesting to switch to the Japanese one every once in a while via the dual audio button on my remote control. It sounds like a pretty young and excited announcer in the lead, an older guy, and a really annoying chick. Seriously, think Iron Chef and that’s the group who seems to be announcing this football game in Japanese. It’s pretty different from the English one. The on-screen graphics and everything are also done in Japanese, so that’s cool. My TV is old or something and strange, so it always cuts off about an inch around the border of everything. Something like it’s zoomed in a bit too much. Anyways, this has never really been a problem, but right now while watching this game I can’t see the score at the top of the screen, making it a bit annoying.

My other bit of a complaint is that the Super Bowl commercials aren’t included with this Japanese broadcast of the game. Of course this makes complete sense as well, but I’m still a bit disappointed that I don’t get to see the overpriced and elaborately planned Super Bowl commercials along with the game. Luckily, YouTube has all of them uploaded, so I’ll watch those sometime soon. I wonder if the companies had to pay YouTube anything to get the commercials online. I’m thinking no, since they would end up online anyway, but since YouTube does such a good job spreading videos and stuff virally, there will probably be so many more impressions (and re-viewings) from YouTube than with the actual broadcast.

Going to watch the rest of the game and then sleep. It was a long, fun day off spent in Makuhari and Chiba.

8AM Sunday morning, the new Kamen Rider show started up here in Japan, since Kabuto finished up last weekend. This year we have Kamen Rider Den-O (仮面ライダー電王) where Den-O translates to ‘Electric King.’ So far it seems like the plot involves a time traveling train, monsters possessing humans, multiple personalities, and dimensional portals. Just like most Japanese kids TV shows! The title character is a guy named Ryotaro, who is a total wuss. Everything about him, including his voice, is just pure submissive loser. Not much of a hero, right? Oh but wait, he is possessed by an “Imagin,” one of the group of monsters/bad guys in the series who are traveling through time to change things in order to make the present and future better for themselves. Ryotaro is apparently the “chosen one,” which means he has some kind of control over the Imagin within, and also he can transform into Den-O with a henshin belt and a special train pass. Yes, his belt theme is based on Suica train passes. He swipes it over the belt and stuff happens.

The Imagin who has possessed Ryotaro doesn’t care about obeying orders or changing the future; he just wants to fight, regardless of the opponent. So, this coincidentally goes along very well with his host, who can transform into a Kamen Rider with all kinds of crazy weapons and stuff. They’ll go ahead and fight Imagin all over the place. When the Imagin takes over Ryotaro’s body, he goes slightly Super Saiyan; his hair style becomes more vertical and gains a red stripe. His voice also changes from ‘prepubescent girl’ to ‘crazy mofo,’ and he gets a lot stronger to boot. According to a short scene in the opening credits and the official website, it looks like Ryotaro will also be possessed by a bunch of other Imagin later on, which will then help him achieve different Rider forms. The standard/normal form (what was in the first episode) is Sword Form, and he should be getting Axe Form, Rod Form, and Gun Form sometime over the next few months. In addition to presumably different monsters and voices for each of these personalities/forms, there will also be different styles of dress, as you can see here. So far, the red Sword Form Imagin will wear a leather jacket. There will also be, I guess, businessman, samurai ruffian, and crazy crackhead covered in spray paint.

When Ryotaro first transforms with the magic Suica, he is in a very basic skeleton form:

That form, of course sucks, in part because the ‘real’ Kotaro with the girly voice is in control. So to change forms and let the Imagin take over, he presses the red button on his belt and swipes his train pass again. More armor appears, and he is transformed into the red Sword Form. The monster is in charge now, voice and all. This is the ‘standard’ form of the series, so we’ll be seeing this one the most:

This post is already nerdy as it is, so I’m going to go for broke and show you the upcoming Axe and Rod forms:

The show wasn’t bad; I’ll be keeping up with it throughout the broadcast. The only major complaint I have is the CG for the DenLiner train; it looks absolutely horrible. All the recent Kamen Rider shows have had this problem. The costumes, stunts, etc all looks pretty good, but most of the major CG they use looks awful. Far too cartoony and not realistic enough to fit with the rest of the show (well, not realistic, but you know what I mean). Every time they showed a shot of the DenLiner I had to just shake my head. It was the same with Hibiki when the terrible CG monsters showed up. Ah well.

Links:
Kamen Rider Den-O official site (TV Asahi)
Den-O promo and trailer (YouTube)
Den-O opening title sequence (YouTube)

Although my job isn’t bad, I would like to take some time to ramble on about how absolutely horrible Saturdays are for me. I suppose not necessarily because of the teaching or working part, but because I have to wake up so freaking early. As a rule of thumb, I generally try to set my alarm clock for 2 hours before I need to be at work. Almost every day, I have to be at work at 1PM, so I set my alarm clock for a healthy 11AM. This usually means I hit the snooze button a few times, and generally wake up “for real” by noon. I then check any AIM messages, e-mail, Facebook, mixi, all in that order. My routine is then to get in the shower by 12:15, out of the shower by 12:25, do post shower things (contacts, deodorant, hair gel) by 12:30, be dressed by 12:40, and out the door shortly after that. It takes approximately 3 minutes for me to get from my apartment to my school, and I am supposed to be at work at least 10 minutes early when students might be waiting, which is almost all the time. As you can see, I have my mornings finely tuned to near-OCD-levels of routine. My body likes this. I like this. I do not like surprises. I go to bed on average at 3AM, meaning I get around 8 hours of sleep every night. So nothing really goes and screws things up quite like…

THE DREADED SATURDAY MORNING WAKE UP ALARM

Since AEON has more students who want to come in on Saturdays, and I guess students are too preoccupied with the Japanese habit of maintaining social relationships (meaning they go out and get plastered) on weekend nights, AEON decided long ago that instead of the comfortable 12-9PM hours they keep every other day of the week, Saturdays are open from 10AM-7. My perfect system of waking up at 11 and snoozing in until almost noon is ruined by this once a week 8AM alarm clock. It seriously feels like death every Saturday morning, especially since after 5 days or more of sleeping at 3AM-ish, it is pretty hard to fall asleep early on Friday nights. And now that the new season of Tadano Hitoshi has started, I’m guaranteed to be up at least until 1ish. It is pretty inevitable that I will get around 5 hours of sleep on Friday nights, then feel like a zombie all Saturday.

I woke up this morning, feeling in pain as usual, but forced myself through my morning routine that is shifted 3 hours earlier than the rest of the week. Instead of the normal news, cooking, or Tamori shows on TV while I’m getting ready, I was greeted by Saturday morning cartoons. There was a crazy Megaman show where his arm talks to him, and then the gayest show I have ever seen, even for Japan. It was called Fairy Musketeers, and had a bunch of little anime kids running around and fighitng with +7 swords and maces and stuff like that. After getting out the door a little bit early, I decided to grab some Matsuya, the gyudon place, for breakfast. They have a 390 yen breakfast set, which has rice, miso soup, seaweed, an egg, a sausage, some cabbage salad, and your choice of a side. Although the natto was tempting because it is so delicious and doesn’t smell like a dead body, I decided to go with a small bowl of pork and onions as my side. Overall, it was a ton of food for way cheap, but I had to scarf it all down in about 5 minutes or so. Then I went to school and taught on a full stomach. I don’t really feel like going much into the actual details of school, but I probably will talk about AEON school in general at some point eventually.

Met up with Mike today, a fellow IES-alum but from the Fall semester after me, since he has recently moved into Goi and will be working at a Nova school up near Chiba somewhere. After work ended at 7, I went with him and Blanchard to JJ Club 100, this arcade/amusement place 2 stations away from Goi that one of my high school students had told me about. It is a pretty big place, with lots of random stuff to do. Kind of like a ghetto arcade/carnival/amusement park all rolled into 1 big building with a character mascot who looks like a cartoon sperm, or the mascot from the old Quisp cereal. You get a membership card, then are charged by the time you are in the facilities. It’s 105 yen per 15 minutes, so about a buck. After that you can pretty much do everything for free. The only things that seemed to cost money were some crane games and vending machines. They had a decent amount of arcade games, although nothing brand new (and some that were right ancient), miniature golf, ping pong, batting cages, billiards, karaoke, darts, slot machines that you don’t win anything on, and other random stuff. It was fun just because you could do a bunch of random activities that you probably wouldn’t do otherwise. For the record, I am the world’s worst batter, possibly equally terrible at DDR, but surprisingly not too bad at the shameful Para-Para Dancing motion sensing game. The horse racing game was also pretty fun, although tiring. I rode that horse hard.

They also had these ropes hooked up to zip lines, and you fly across a little alley into some padding. Although it looks stupid, it was way fun and I laughed like a little kid. JJ’s did provide some pretty good entertainment for the night, and it was good to do anything of entertainment value after waking up early to teach pretty much straight classes from 10-7. Tomorrow I think I am going to hit up the World Hobby Fair, a free games and stuff convention at Makuhari, and will likely blog about that at some point. I will also then fit in the Tokyo Auto Salon, which was a convention I went to at the Messe last week. It’s convenient that all these shows happen only 30 minutes away from me. I suspect there will be much ranting about nerds, because even at a car show there was a seriously high percentage of nerds taking pictures of booth girls.

Not really, I just wanted to use that quote. I bought Season 3 of Arrested Development, by the way, and am taking it to Japan. Yes, I actually buy DVDs….but only on rare occasion.

I’m heading to Japan in the morning, and am in the very early stages of packing and stuff. Yes, it would have been a lot better if I would have started this, say, last week when I was doing nothing but watching E.R. and Saved by the Bell on TV, but oh well. I have a 2 hour layover or so in Chicago, so I’ll probably be calling some people since it will be the last time I can do so for cheap. I do plan looking into internet phone stuff though, so who knows. Don’t delete my phone number unless you really hate me or your phone is just that full; I am keeping my same cell phone and number for whenever I’m in the US, even though I have no idea when that will be next.

Will arrive at Narita on Friday afternoon Japan time, then will be in Omiya for a week and possibly an extra 3 days doing AEON training. Then it’s off to Ichihara to start teaching. I’ll write more blogs, even if I don’t have an internet connection. Wait and see.

Over Sunday and Monday, I didn’t do too much of note, although I did make some progress on my business work. On Sunday, I spent most of my day out at LaLaPort, the super huge mall in Chiba. There’s a Toys R Us and an Akachan Honpo there, so I was able to do some work while going back to a somewhat familiar place. There is a Shakey’s pizza buffet there, but it was a Sunday lunchtime, so it was packed. I didn’t feel like spending 2 hours to wait to gorge myself on pizza alone, so I ate elsewhere. LaLa Port is such a huge mall, even bigger than some in the US, I think, but it is mostly clothes shops where you can buy t-shirts that cost 6000 yen. That’s right, $60.

Monday, I headed out to Makuhari. Things really don’t seem too different there from last summer, except for 1 new building or complex that you can see right after exiting Kaihim station. It was kind of weird, since I walked past the bus queue and didn’t even notice it, then looked to my right and thought to myself “did that just pop out of no where?” Chances are it didn’t, but it is Japan, so maybe it appeared out of the ground to launch a robot or something. I was planning on going to Carrefour and Plena to investigate their baby product selections, but instead went to the IES Center around 4. I ended up staying there until almost 6:30, so there wasn’t much investigation done for that part of the afternoon. Got to catch up with the now-assistant director Shin-san, who is awesome as ever but he now has some fashionable glasses. He also moved from his little office in the front of the center to the “main” office area in the back, so at least he has a window now. Although it is a view of an alley, it’s still natural sunlight I guess. He introduced me to the new Director, Marik-san, and was like “he was here over a year ago, but it doesn’t seem like it.” I didn’t think about it much before, but it has been an entire year and I feel like I was only gone for a few weeks. I guess I’m just that well adapted/desensitized to being in Japan. Oh ya, and the new director is a pretty cool guy. He apparently was one of the guys who started United Nations University, and has been in Japan for over 30 years, so you could say that he’s more than qualified to run IES Tokyo.

Went to Y’s afterwards, Shin came to hang out for a bit then had to go for a meeting. Yoko and Tomomi came, and we stayed until close. I missed Y’s so much. Pretty much the same as usual, although I think the food selection actually improved a bit, since they had sashimi, rice (not fancy, but they were missing it before), and those BBQ riiiiiiiiibs. Also a snow-cone machine for the summer. Was given a Nikka and chocolate snow cone, which actually isn’t as bad as you would think. Matsushita-san was awesome as always, and gave us the usual counter even though we didn’t have that many people. I really think Y’s might be the greatest place in the whole country; we have to get a complete A-Team reunion there sometime soon.

I’ll likely come back to Makuhari once or twice more this trip. I’m kind of glad now that my AEON placement is out in Ichihara, because while it’s an hour/an hour and a half away from Tokyo, it’s only 30 minutes from Makuhari. Honestly, I think I might like Makuhari more than Tokyo on the whole. It’s not as big and doesn’t have as much variety or weird stuff, but just for hanging out and everyday things, the place is perfect. Carrefour has everything you need, you can hang out at Y’s and Hana no Mae, and if you want to work out, eat Indian food, and study 1000 kanji a day, then the World Business Garden is right there. Haha.

Two points that don’t really fit with the rest of this entry. Instead of writing a transition to make the flow of ideas smooth, I will just bust into them straight forward:

– By 2011, all Japanese TVs will be digital. They will have to be, or it won’t work with broadcast TV. Since all broadcast signals will be digital, everyone has to have a digital or high-vision (HD) TV by then if they want to watch TV and stuff. Although it sounds like a sweet idea, I guess it kind of sucks for old people who just want to watch the news, or people who don’t really want to buy a fancy new TV. But hey it’s Japan.

– Shin-san said that there is a popular TV drama show (the most popular one at the moment) called Supli (サプリ) starring Misaki Ito that tapes all of the office scenes in the IES building (Sumitomo Chemical Engineering Bldg) in Makuhari, on the 16th floor or something. Every Thursday through Sunday they’re up there taping. If I happen to be in the area, I’ll see if I can sneak a peak at anything. Shin-san says he saw Misaki Ito at the Sunkus downstairs, which is awesome because she is absolutely super mega hot. He also saw them taping the Kamen Rider Kabuto stuff around there, which is awesome also.