Recent Japan Events

Sorry for the infrequency of blog posts. Blogspot was in read only mode for awhile, I guess figuring that reddit is some hip trend-setter now. Since then, I've just been pretty busy. Here's what's been going on recently in rough chronological order:

Buying Stuff
So I sort of hit that scary turning point I mentioned awhile ago where suddenly the overwhelming amount of stuff to buy ceased to intimidate me from buying anything. I started writing down the price of everything that I was somewhat interested in and where it could be found. This was for curiosity as much as anything; I was curious about exactly what sort of price range and inventory difference existed between stores (answer: a lot). But once I started getting this little catalog going everything started to seem pretty manageable. My other mistake was looking up the online price for this stuff, which, not even including shipping, often seemed to be about double what I would pay here. That is, if it wasn't just straight-up sold out everywhere, which was also quite common. So yeah. I didn't exactly break my bank or anything, and by this point I'm pretty sure I got everything for about the best price it could be had in Osaka, but I did get a bunch of stuff I really don't need. OH WELL. Not going to "spoil" what it is yet, I'd like to surprise some people with a "big unveil" and do big shots of like the whole haul at once.

Even though, at this point, I think I've got pretty much everything I'm going to get. I think.

Also I found a bunch of the fairly obscure manga that I was looking for, so that was a lucky break.

The big Smash Bros 64 rematch

So I played my cousin at Super Smash Bros. at the video game bar, it went pretty well. He beat me the first few matches and then I sort of got my flow back for the game and beat him after that but oh well. Fun times! It amazes me to think about how long we've been doing these matches, and in how many different places. It would be a lot cooler if we were like the best two players in the world, or at least good enough to give it some real Ryu/Ken type gravity, but whatever.

All You Can Eat Dim Sum Restaurant

Went to an All You Can Eat Dim Sum Restaurant on top of this gigantic electronics store that I swear was like five Best Buys stacked on each other with two fashion malls on top of that and then a bunch of restaurants on top of that. It wasn't the best Dim Sum I've ever had but even the worst dim sum ever would be better than a lot of food. Plus, all you can eat! It was a combination of a buffet thing where you got stuff like noodles and potstickers and things like that and then they had ala carte stuff where people would just wheel out carts of fresh har gow or whatever and shout what they have and you call them over if you want it. Swag! But also difficult because sometimes we didn't know what it was. Usually we got it anyways though and that's how I ended up trying this really nice bun with this delicious sweet custard in side that I wish I knew the name of. Ah well.

Did some really quality wandering around

I "photodocumented" this pretty well on the Facebook album if you want to check it out. Found a park and some other neat things like that. Oh found a supermarket with a self serve checkout lane and a thing you can dump change into fairly quickly which adds up to those 1-yen coins finally being useful. I used this "trick" pretty extensively back home and it was quite nice to see it work here. Oh and here's a story. Occasionally you get kids who shout "hello" at you or whatever, I figure it's cause they're excited to see if their English "works". So you say "hello" back and that's usually it. Anyways I came across some kids one day that did this and afterwards they said "America?" and I said "Oh, no, Canada". This excited them immensely for some reason, I guess they had never met a Canadian before. They practically swarmed me and asked me a bunch of questions half in Japanese that I did my best to answer. One kid was literally jumping up and down with excitement. Fun times!

I finally found my earbuds

And they are quite good. I'm not used to this style of "in-ear" so they seem way louder and more isolating than I'm used to in an earbud, but that's fine. The bass also seems unfeasibly good and the general level of quality seems way outside of this price point. Highly tempted to buy like six pairs because I am so paranoid about breaking them, I have the worst luck with earbud cords. Also highly tempted to go back to all the audiophile stores I was looking for them in and show them to the clerks just so they don't forever remember me as that white kid who was looking for a nonexistent model.

Now I just need to get an actual working mp3 player and we're all set! Probably will hit kijiji/eBay/pawn shops for that when I get home because repairing the headphone jack on mine is looking more costly and difficult than it's worth. Probably will just get another 60GB iPod video, I like the interface and I think it's the largest size that rockbox works with. Plus I can do some parts trading with my old one if I need to.

I swear crispy sandwiches are some sort of magic

I woke up yesterday feeling sort of glum or preturbed or something, not sure why. Maybe I was starting to get concerned about having to leave or wondering what I would do in the fall or worrying about money or wondering why I keep watching A-Channel or hungry or some combination but nothing was consciously wrong, I was just off and probably subconsciously fretting. Anyways I left in the early afternoon with no real plan. I popped into this convience store on the way out and saw that they had THE CRISPY SANDWICH, which is this ice-cream sandwich type product that Haagan Dazs sells here in like, strawberry and vanilla and green tea I think. So it's a bit expensive, being Haagan Dazs, but I'm like oh well when else am I going to try this? So I got one and oh my it is tasty. It was so good that it somehow it fixed every single problem. Within an hour of eating that I happened upon a random store that had three things I was looking for and couldn't find and several things way cheaper than where I'd considered getting them before. And the day just kept getting better!

Zine fair

I got home and my cousin had invited me to go see him at a "zine fair" that he was at. I assumed this was some sort of thing where people swapped zines and I was right about that but really that did nothing to actually help me understand what it would be like. It took place in this factory that had been converted into a loft where a few people lived in some sort of really communal setup. I guess they have all this space so they let people host events there pretty often. Quite swag, I must say. The crowd was really white, a lot of mid-20s kids who came over to teach English, like my cousin. The aesthetic is something I'd expect to see mocked lovingly on hipster runoff. We got there too late for most of the zine action but we hung around for some of the bands that were playing. I found a copy of Finnegan's Wake in English in a bookshelf where someone had written in notes that really intrigued me but I couldn't figure out who had done it. The bands seemed like high school age but I am bad at telling age. They all played the new sort of Japanese garage rock that I really like. One was all-girl but their music was nothing like HTT's. Oh well.

Karaoke

After that we had dinner and met up with some of my cousin's friends and went in did kareoke. I've really wanted to do karaoke ever since seeing it in my Japanese animes. It was quite an eclectic crowd which led to some pretty diverse music being chosen, but I was surprised by how many songs I seemed to know without being able to remember hearing them more than once, if at all. Anyways yeah it was mad fun, I sang some like, Supertramp, Neil Young, Outkast, etc. Also probably the first time I have been "out all night" which was interesting.

 Wrestling

Today I saw JAPANESE WRESTLING woo which I probably wouldn't have thought to want to go to were it not for a friend of mine being really into such things and heartily recommending it. And I probably wouldn't have gone anyways if said friend hadn't had really good taste in everything else. So yeah, this was really great. We fanangled cheap and front row seats through a friend of my cousin's somehow, so the view was about as good as it got. It was an all-female "cast" or whatever, all of them with outlandish costumes and some pretty crazy athletic prowess. It wasn't the sort of fanservicey female wrestling you hear of here, but it wasn't like actual competition either, it was still the staged sort of "show" of the WWE and such, but much less serious. There was a lot of what anime has told me is traditional Osakan comedy in the middle of the fights, too, I didn't understand most of it but I picked up on the "what the hecks" and "are you stupids" that I understand to be trademarks of the style. It was pretty funny. I think my favorite "bit" was when one of the wrestlers was giving some sort of mid-battle boasting speech and "forgot her lines" halfway through and having one of the assistants run up with a big cue card. I think that was what was going on. A lot of humor based on the fact that it was so over the top and ridiculous. But ridiculously impressive, too, they were doing flips and big kicks from the rope and piledrivers and all that jazz. I can never figure out exactly how some of the stuff is "faked" I mean I know when they "kick their faces" and such it isn't "real" but when they do something like jump from the uh turnstile and land on the other girl's stomach, I don't get how that can't hurt quite a lot.

So yeah, that was wrestling. If anyone is really curious about the specifics I think I could probably track down some videos from this "league" or something. I'd pass on the recommendation to anyone else. Really fun times.