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It’s already Wednesday night? The weeks seem to pass by pretty quickly. This is both good and bad. Good because work seems to go by fairly painlessly in the long-run, but bad because leisure and weekend time goes by just as quick. I’m also starting to realize that I’m not getting anything done in the long-run. Not that there’s anything pressing at the moment to actually get done.

Last weekend was pretty fun. Mueller and Hoyt flew into Tokyo for the weekend, so I met up with them Saturday night after work. Met in Shibuya at Hachiko, a place which always reminds me just how many foreigners are in Tokyo compared to Chiba. It was good to see some friends from the US, especially ones I haven’t hung out with in a long time. For one reason or another, March seems to be the time to visit Japan, because I have a lot of people coming this month. Unfortunately, it’s times like this that the virtual inability to take days off from work really starts to be a pain. But anyways, I met up with the guys and we went to the Starbucks overlooking Scramble Crossing to hang out. Had fun talking about people we went to high school with, the ridiculous number of people who are (getting) married now, and also trying to think of the most obscure people we could name.

After a lot of loitering, it was time to find somewhere in Shibya to go, so we started walking around looking for a deal and/or a guy on the street with a menu to bargain with. No go, but I accidentally found the Shibuya location of The Lockup, a chain of bar/pubs that are themed on an old school jail or a cave, with dark “cells” for tables, waitresses dressed in cop outfits, and monsters running around with plastic knives. Every once in a while, the monsters are released and “attack” the place, which is funny at least for the first few minutes. Almost immediately after sitting down, there was a monster attack, so it was a pretty entertaining way to start. A lot of the drinks at Lockup are also themed on jails, science experiments, zombies, and random stuff like that. I had no idea what any of the super weird ones were, but we ordered the 電気ショック (Electric Shock), which didn’t have ingredients listed on the menu, but just said it was a “super strong house cocktail.” How bad can it be, right? After we ordered them, the waitress again warned us that it was really strong. Seriously, can’t be that bad, right? Uhh… After they brought the drinks to our table and poured them from the graduated cylinder into the plastic beaker acting as a class, we realized they weren’t kidding. What was listed as the house cocktail ended up being a glass of everclear with 2 ice cubes and a lemon wedge. If a drink ever deserved to be called an Electric Shock, this was it.

After Lockup, searched around for a cheap all-night karaoke place, but unfortunately nothing was as cheap as I was hoping to be able, even after bargaining. Ended up at one of the Shibuya UtaHiro’s, and it was pretty good but not great and not as good as the Chiba UtaHiro I’m used to. My main complaint was that the remote controller and search computer were more ghetto than the current one’s, so it was a little more of a pain to use and didn’t have an English feature for the other guys to use. Overall, it was a good night. After we finished karaoke at 5AM, stopped by McDonalds for the greatest Egg McMuffin I have ever eaten. I was starving after not eating dinner the night before, and random fried foods at Lockup didn’t constitute a meal.

Mueller and Hoyt wanted to go to the Tsukiji fish market, especially since we were already/still up that early, when the market is usually at it’s peak. Sounded like a good idea, and I wanted to eat some of the awesome sushi from near there. I think the market is still open to the public, but just the auction part is now closed to tourists. Either way it didn’t matter, since after we got to Tsukiji Station, completely exhausted from an all-nighter, the station attendant told me the market was closed on Sundays. Ugh. Said goodbye to the guys and headed home, sleeping the entire way back and even sleeping past my station. It was only 1 station past though, so it was an easy backtrack. Slept til the afternoon.

The weather on Monday was amazing; almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit! Rented a bike and rode to D2 to buy some apartment supplies and grabbed lunch at Gusto, which has been renovated since the last time I was there a few months ago. Unfortunately, it’s been remodeled into more of a cafe, so while the interior is nice, the menu is different and they don’t have the Gusto Burger anymore, one of the decent non-fast-food burgers I had found around here. Oh well.

In one of the Chiba arcades I frequent, they recently added a big package of Cheetos as one of the prizes you can win in the UFO Catcher crane games. Crane games here are a lot different than in the US, mainly because the prizes you win are of some relative quality, rather than the knock-off-brand stuffed animals and sticky rubber hands you might get at the Big Lots “skill claw” machine. The ones here have stuff you actually want. Stuff you really want sometimes, which is bad because they also cost at least 100 yen a pop, meaning trying to win that stuffed animal of a bear with bloody claws could cost you 2000 yen if you’re not careful (ahem, Brian). This doesn’t mean that the stuff is actually useful, just tempting. I haven’t kept track of how much money I have spent on UFO catchers this year, but it would be embarrassing and depressing. However, to show for it, I have stuff taking up space in my apartment like a big plastic Haro bank, a stuffed animal of the Owl coffee shop guy from Animal Crossing, a penguin coffee mug, and a few Lincoln action figures.

Anyways.

I wanted to share with you quickly the package of Japanese Cheetos you can win here. Please read the English coming out of our friend Chester Cheetah’s mouth. (click the picture to see larger version). While not exactly Engrish, this is still pretty funny to see. I wonder who translated/wrote it for them. It is as follows:

Hey. I’m Chester Cheetah.
I Love Cheetos Cheese hell a lot!
Why not try Cheetos Cheese!!

Too bad Japanese Cheetos are gross and not the same as the US ones. Trust me, I’ve tried them and was horribly disappointed.

It’s very interesting to be in a Japanese store, especially a department store, at closing time. I was shopping in the Sogo building in Chiba earlier tonight, and it dawned on me that when stores in the US were closing, you kind of get a feeling like “I have to get out of here before the employees get pissed and start throwing things at me.” Here is the opposite. First off, almost every store here plays Auld Lang Syne (the New Years song) when it’s closing time. It’s a very peaceful, lullaby-esque song, so rather than panicking, you can finish up your shopping and don’t feel pressured or anything. In department stores and maybe other large stores, employees who aren’t helping customers or stocking shelves all line up and say goodbye to the customers. They stand at the end of aisles, in their departments, etc. They smile, give you a super deep bow (I saw some 90 degree angle ones), and say “Thank you so much for coming, please come again” and such. This actually was a bit creepy/embarrassing as I was shopping on the 8th floor and had employees lining my path out of the store and down the escalators all the way down to the first floor. Getting off on each floor from the escalator, there were at least 3 or 4 more employees waiting for me, bowing and thanking me for visiting their store. You feel strange to make eye contact, and definitely don’t say anything back to them. In some ways, you feel like royalty because it’s like having a bunch of servants ushering you out, bowing to you, and pretty much making Japan the most polite and hospitable country in the universe.

Almost makes you not as bitter about most stores closing here at 8PM.

Yes, those grammar errors are on purpose; I hear that exact sentence at least 3 or 4 times a week from students when I go through the formality of asking how their weekends were. Anyways, after a fairly normal week at work, it is yet again the weekend; the oasis in the desert wasteland of having a regular job. Actually, before I get too far into the weekend reports, I should mention that the one irregularity of this past week was that one of my coworkers caught the Norovirus, which is apparently becoming more and more of a problem here in Japan, and was out of work from Monday through Friday, which included a three day stay in the hospital on an IV. I did a quick search online for the norovirus earlier in the week because I wanted to know exactly what it was; it’s some kind of stomach flu I think, and is likely to outbreak in places where there are high concentrations of people. Cruise ships, for example, seem to be having tons of norovirus outbreaks. Of course, working at an AEON school where you have students coming in sick ALL THE TIME (seriously, I don’t want you coming to class if you’re sick, even if you wear a stupid face mask), I’m not really surprised that someone caught this sickness. I think Matt, the other foreign teacher at my school, might have had a norovirus a few weeks ago also when he was really sick as well. The amazing thing is that no one else at my school caught the norovirus, since when we had the Christmas/year-end party last week we shared a lot of dishes at the Korean restaurant and I’m sure germs were passed around through that. I seem to be perfectly fine, which may very well be helped in part by the fact that I’m conscious of sleeping a lot every night (mainly out of laziness), and also because I keep a bottle of Purel sanitizing alcohol gel in my desk drawer. It doesn’t seem so OCD now, does it!?

Oh, right; weekend. After reading through my Japan guidebook randomly this week to get ideas for the upcoming Kansai trip, I started feeling more adventurous and decided that it would be worth hitting up Tokyo this weekend, something I haven’t really had any desire to do recently. Anyway, for 1910 yen, I can buy a JR Tokunai Pass (都区内パス) from my home station that will take me to and from Tokyo, and also allows for unlimited train travel within the city. Which actually is a pretty good deal as long as you’re going to 2 or 3 places in the city. Woke up insanely early for a Sunday, 10AM, then met up with Blanchard in Chiba, and off to Tokyo we were. Embarrassingly, our first stop was Akihabara, mainly because it is the closest part of Tokyo but also because it was lunch time and I wanted to go to the Oedo kaiten sushi place I used to go to whenever I visited nerd town. The cheap sushi place is in the Akihabara Department Store connected to the station, which is being demolished at the end of the year so they can build a super futuristic new department store. It was probably my last chance to eat at that sushi place, but it was busy so we decided it wasn’t worth the wait and instead got cheap ramen. It was not a bad alternative at all. By the way, if you didn’t know this, I love ramen. And miso ramen is absolutely amazing. And if it’s cheap, even better.

Other reason for Akihabara was that I needed some blank DVD+Rs, which for some reason seem much rarer in stores here. I need the +s because those are the only kind my laptop’s burner will accept, which is a pain. I figured of all places, Akihabara, the famed electronics area of Tokyo, would have mountains of DVD+Rs for my burning pleasure. I was finally able to find some at the super giant mega Yodobashi, although couldn’t really even find a 50 spindle. I asked the worker guy and finally learned why +Rs are so hard to find here. It’s an American standard! That makes sense, and I am slightly less bitter about having to hunt for these rare +Rs to amass my burned DVD collection. It might be worth either having spindles of +Rs send from the US, or maybe even buying a new DVD burner for my laptop. Either way. Oh yeah, and Akihabara has really lost whatever appeal it had a while back. The maids, weirdos, and anime otaku have really warped that place from it’s semi-warped state a few years ago. There are very few stores in the area that I even want to go to, and even less stuff I want to buy. I doubt I’ll be going back there very much; it’s just too nerdy and desolate. The super giant mega Yodobashi, however, is a good electronics store if you ever need one.

After Akihabara we headed to Shinjuku to check out some stores, mainly Takashimaya and Tokyu Hands. Not much to report, although it might be a good time to mention just how many foreigners there are in Tokyo. I think I’ve gotten used to Chiba, and definitely Goi, where you’re more likely to spot a man dressed as a giant stuffed animal than see another foreigner. So speaking of foreigners, we saw the worst group of foreigners ever while waiting in line to get into Tabasa in Harajuku for dinner, the “all-you-can eat pizza, pasta, hip-hop, goodtime, pancakes, and jelly” restaurant that is cheap and delicious. The quickest way to explain them is to use a certain American slang term for white Eminem-type clones. I don’t think I want to offend anyone, so I’m going to call them “wee gars” in this blog post. However that isn’t exactly correct since only 4 of them were white and the other was some kind of Latino. I think you get the picture though. So yeah, like 5 of them, all dressed in the same way – sweat pants, t-shirt or jersey, stupid hat cocked to the side or something angled. They didn’t speak normal English let alone Japanese, spoke really loud, and acted like they were the baddest mofos in Tokyo. We tried to figure out what their deal was and why they are in Japan, but I think the conclusion was that they’re probably military brats, since they didn’t seem to be of working/teacher let alone university student classification. They had cell phones, so they must live here, so I’m going to assume military kids who have nothing better to do but pretend they’re from “da meen streetz.” The worst was this little blond kid who needed a good throttling, but the funniest was this dopey looking kid who was wearing the surefire sign that you are a social outcast and don’t belong in Japan – the shirt that says, in Japanese “I’m looking for a Japanese girlfriend.” Come on. If you wear this shirt, girls aren’t going to be like “oh wow, he’s looking for a Japanese girlfriend. I am a girl, and Japanese. I should have sexual relations with this person right away.” Listen up mister wee gar; when the people in the restaurant, mainly the young couple, were looking at your shirt and laughing, it wasn’t because they thought you were clever.

Finished up the night in Shibuya, where we didn’t really do anything but walk around and look at the fancy lights and jumbotron video screens. It was getting pretty boring just walking around the streets, until there was a bit of an incident outside of Seibu. A Lincoln Navigator was parked outside of the store illegally, and was about a foot and a half into the street. A bus driver decided that he didn’t want to risk scraping this HUGE AWESOME AMERICAN SUV MACHINE so traffic on this road was pretty much at a standstill except for the occasional motorcycle. Lots of car horns were being honked, and finally the police were called. Tonight was a great lesson, or shall I say, reconfirmation, that Japanese police are absolutely useless. At first, after we started watching, two cops on foot showed up after, assumingly, someone in Seibu called them. They called fo
r backup, which brought another cop on foot and two in a squad car. The only sweet thing was that Japanese squad cars have the ability to raise their car-top sirens an extra two feet or so into the air. Other than that, they did nothing impressive. They wrote a ticket, took pictures with their digital camera, and documented the situation in a notebook. One of the cops used the megaphone and speakers built into the squad car to pretty much repeatedly say “Will the owner of a Lincoln Navigator with plate number blah blah blah please come and move your car?” After almost 45 minutes of us sitting around with a growing group of bystanders, I got bored and we went to find a vending machine. We were gone for less than 5 minutes I’d say, and by the time we came back the Navigator was gone and traffic was running normally. I really wanted to see how this situation would be resolved, but since it took so little time I’m guessing the guy showed up, apologized and bowed a lot, and they let him go. I was hoping for a yakuza shoot out! The morale of this story is that the police wasted about 45 minutes and traffic in a very busy part of Tokyo was interrupted by a mis-parked car. Why didn’t they get a tow truck!? If this were the states, a tow truck would have been there to haul the car away. There would have been no need for many cops, there would not have been a spectacle, and it wouldn’t have taken 45 minutes. Ah well, it was at least entertaining for a while. I do wish I would have seen the resolution, no matter how boring it probably was.

1 more day of the weekend; thank goodness. Then it’s a short (4 day) week because the entire country has next Saturday off for the Emperor’s Birthday. The only useful thing the emperor does!

(Yes, I love that pun.) This past week was pretty much the same as most weeks, with the major exception being the huge purchase I made last Saturday during my lunch break. The Nintendo Wii finally was released in Japan, and I had reserved one at the Goi Laox, a Best Buy kind of store, so I was able to get it no problem. I’m glad I did, since both Laox and the department store Ito-Yokado were completely sold out of the systems by 2PM on launch day. Games don’t seem to be in any short demand though, which is good. I haven’t purchased a video game console in a long time, let alone on launch day, so I was pretty excited about getting home that night and playing this new toy. And yes, it was as fun as expected. Even playing it at E3 last May, and seeing commercials, displays, etc for it since then, having it in my apartment and being able to play it all I want was really way more fun than I even expected. The controls, despite being wireless and everything, are more accurate than you would expect as well. I bought Wii Sports and Zelda, both of which are awesome. Blanchard bought an extra controller that came with Hajimete no Wii (Wii Play in the US), so with all those games I’ve had something to further take away from my free time. I’ve played Zelda the most, and it really is a good way to kill 2 or 3 hours of your evening at a time, even when you don’t mean to. Well, I think that’s enough of a nerdy video game rant. If you like video games, I definitely recommend getting a Wii. It’s fun and cheaper than a PS3, and there are at least good games for it right now. I might end up getting a PS3 in a few years, but for right now, there aren’t hardly any games I’d want to play for it. That and it costs more than like 500 cans of Boss coffee.

Last night my entire school’s staff had a year-end/Christmas party in Chiba, which was fun because it was a good chance to hang out with my staff outside of work. We went to this Korean restaurant named Kim-chan which was really good. There was some Korean okonomiyaki/pancake type thing full of vegetables and seafood that was served on a hot iron plate that was absolutely amazing. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was definitely worth ordering again. The restaurant wasn’t super cheap, but it was way good. After that we went to Uta-Hiroba near Chiba-Chuo station for all night karaoke, which was awesome, but we were all exhausted by like 4AM. It was a painful walk back to the station and back home in the morning after the trains were running again. I came home and slept pretty much the entire day, and it felt great. Also finally figured out what I’m doing over winter break. I have a decent amount of time off (Dec 23-25, then Dec 28-Jan 4), but am not going back to the States this time. I wanted to at least do something, though, so I’m going with Blanchard down to kansai, the western part of Japan, for a few days. I haven’t been down there for a few years so it should be really cool. Definitely want to check out Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. Shinkansen tickets are decently priced and I think it’s less hassle than getting a plane ticket, but I can’t help feeling strange about paying so much money to go halfway down an island that is about the size of California. Ah well; it should be fun.

This blog post has been a work in process for over three hours. I obviously didn’t write for that long, but I spent most of the past few hours watching a Japanese movie called Always: 三丁目の夕日 (English title: Always Sunset on Third Street) which is set in the late 1950’s in Japan. The film does a really nice job of recreating the look of what I guess that period in time looked like, and it was nice dramatic film that just showed the life of a bunch of people. I would definitely recommend watching it. Apparently it won a bunch of Japanese Academy Awards and did pretty well in international film festivals and such. Find it at your local Tsutaya, or on the bit torrent site of your liking.

And I leave you tonight with a nice bit of Engrish, found at a store in the Soga Ario mall. And no, it’s not really some dirty book, just whatever in the world the “Sendenkaigi Award Text” is. Still, it’s funny.

Very rarely does stuff here in Japan really stick out to me as “futuristic.” I think I’ve just become desensitized to it all, although I suppose in general things here are pretty technologically advanced when compared to back home in the States. That is, for the most part, because a lot of times, simple things (ie, anything that requires a form) generally take about 2 months on average to complete But anyways, Japan still has stuff like cell phones with video conferencing and voice-activated GPS, cars that parallel park automatically, and even toilets that play music and give your butt a shower. None of this is all that surprising to me. For the first time in a long while, however, this past weekend, I saw something that reminded me how advanced this small island nation really is.

It was a video game, although it wasn’t the PS3, DS, Wii, and of course not the X-Box 360. It was a game at the arcade from the popular Gundam series, this one called ガンダム：戦場の絆 (Gundam: Senjou no Kizuna), or something like Gundam: The Ties of the Battlefield. Oh, but this isn’t your average arcade came; no, not at all. This game lets you sit in a little pod and actually pretend you’re steering a giant combat robot. Sure there are a lot of games like this, right? Well, this pod brings on a whole new experience. First off, the place looks awesome. One of the arcades near Chiba station had the Gundam pods set up, and it was the most impressive set up I’ve seen in an arcade in a very long while. See the picture on the right? I nabbed it from the official website of this game. (For those of you who can’t read Japanese, it’s still worth looking at. Look at the main page and click on GAME to see some pictures of the pod machines and the actual gameplay.)
You can see on the right here the exterior of the p.o.d. (panoramic optical display) unit. There were 8 of these machines all in one section of the arcade, shiny and brand new. As you can see in the pictures, you sit in the pod, which is like the cockpit of a giant robot, and use the foot pedals and two control-sticks to move around in your Gundam and fight the enemies. The game is a bit like capture the flag, although it really is just running around shooting and slashing the enemies. It sounds basic, but the wrap-around screen and the controls really make you feel like you’re piloting a huge robot. Also, there is a headset in the pod that you put on, and you can talk with the other players on your team. You can plan your strategies and tactics this way, or yell obscenities when you get killed. Or maybe sing a song.

The game is about the same price as other high-end arcade games here, which is expensive by American standards, but the game is so fun it’s worth it. You also buy a Pilot Card which keeps track of your name, score, past battles, records, and points, so that you can keep playing to earn enough points to access more weapons, stages, and Gundam robots to play with. The card has some kind of re-printable surface on it, so everytime you update your card, the printed data on it changes. Really cool. Up to 8 people can play at once, in 4-vs-4 matches. Of course, if you just want to play with a few friends, then the computer players will fill in the rest.

This is seriously one of the coolest arcade games I’ve played in a while, and I don’t even usually like robot/run-around-and-shoot games. Also some sweet extras are the two consoles outside of the pod area, which let you insert your card to purchase new weapons, check our your scores, etc. The thing just looks really cool, with the most futuristic touch-screen interface I’ve ever seen. It seriously looks like something out of Star Trek. That’s it on the left there. There are also two huge plasma TV’s where you can watch people playing and also watch your battles after you’re done. Since you’re playing from the point of view of the cockpit, it’s really cool (and nerdy, I know) to watch the battle afterwards from a bird’s-eye view, and get to see yourself get slaughtered by the enemy, or maybe vice-versa.

So yeah, it is way nerdy to write an entire blog entry about an arcade game, but this Gundam pod game rocks and really reminds me that Japan is the world of tomorrow. I don’t know that much about Gundam, but it’s still fun to run around, jump on buildings, and shoot at the enemy robots. Also, it’s funny how into this game some people already are. There are teams of people who come to play this together, and they have maps of the stages beforehand, all scribbled on with their battle plans, etc. And no, these dedicated players (huge nerds) aren’t really college or high school kids. Most of the ones I’ve seen are salaryman looking guys still in their suits and ties, hanging around in the arcade at night living our their fantasies as Mobile Suit Pilots. I know I am.