yes, you may

Yikes, sick again. I just had a cold around Halloween, how can I have another one so soon? It's not fair! I keep telling myself that as long as there's no fever, I don't have the flu and I've got no excuse to stay home from work. Am I nuts?

Bronchial issues aside, I had a terrific weekend. On Saturday we dropped Go off with Mako's parents (with their blessing!) so the two of us could just spend the day together. Mako was nervous that something would go wrong and that they would never agree to watch him again but I can't imagine why. If anything, Mako's mom is better at getting the baby to fall asleep than either of us!

The first errand of the day turned out to be buying my birthday present. I have been without a wristwatch for the better part of three years now, perhaps longer. I guess when my last watch disappeared/died/whatever, I figured there was no rush to replace it because I already carry around a device that keeps time: it's called a mobile phone. Why bother strapping a completely redundant device to my wrist for a singular purpose?

What I've come to realize during that time is that using a phone as your primary timepiece is a major pain in the ass. First of all, it's always going to be in a pocket somewhere, which means to check the time I have to pull it out. This can not be done in a subtle fashion and we all know there are a variety of social situations where noticeably looking at a clock is a faux pas. Standing in front of a room full of children is certainly one of those situations, and while they are not offended per se it is impossible to look without creating a major distraction.

So after a few months of contemplating a watch, my wife listened to my murmurings and decided it would make a good birthday present. She also wisely realized that picking a watch without my input would be foolish, so we chose one together in Yodobashi Camera. It's probably the most expensive watch I've ever owned, but that's not saying much because I have always favored low-end digital watches. In my mind, wristwatches are like sunglasses: they are entirely too fragile to bother spending a lot of money on. But not this watch! It's a G-Shock with a stainless steel band, black with bronze "highlights" if you will. It feels heavy and looks good.

After buying the watch we went upstairs to Yodobashi The Dining (I love that name for a floor of restaurants) and had a terrific Chinese buffet lunch. It cost too much money, I suppose, but it tasted great and it was a special occasion of sorts. Here's a brief glimpse of our food and my watch as seen on Twitpic:



The main event of the day, by far, was our trip to the movies to see Inglorious Basterds which only just opened in Japan. Given Tarantino's fame here and their absolute adoration for all things Brad Pitt, I'm really surprised it took so long to show up in theaters. Then again, compared to most of the movies I wanted to watch in 2009, it arrived relatively quickly. A three month wait to see Inglorious Basterds is nothing compared to, well, FOREVER for the various indie movies I've been reading about all year. If I'm lucky, District 9 might show up on DVD sometime next winter...and that's a big if.

This sounds like griping but there is a point: in a movie-starved year for me, Inglorious Basterds was the best movie I've seen in a long time. I was a little uneasy about the premise, if only because I feel like I've seen enough World War II movies to last me until World War III, but Quentin Tarantino somehow made a war movie without much of a war in it. Even though nearly all the characters are soldiers, there are no scenes of combat and only a few minutes of gunfire ("few" being relative to the film's substantial length). Nearly all of that action takes place in the finale which is all the more powerful given the scarcity of violence leading up to it.

This is not to say the movie isn't tense; I would argue it's his most riveting film to date. The opening scene felt like it was an hour long but I say that because I was going out of my mind waiting for the hammer to drop. It's ostensibly a conversation between a high-ranking German and a French dairy farmer, full of conversational pleasantries (i.e. "Would you mind if I smoked my pipe?") yet I was on the edge of my seat. I don't know how he does it, but QT's dialogue continues to impress me with each and every picture he makes.

There's also the little things, small moments and quick shots that have no apparent meaning to me but I delighted in each one: Brad Pitt's character has a giant scar on his neck that is never explained. Julie Dreyfus' ridiculously gaudy wardrobe, particularly that leopard-like hat. Landa forgetting about the cream for the strudel, then insisting on waiting for it to arrive, followed by close-ups of it being served. Zoller's increasingly ostentatious uniform. The SS officer drinking beer out of a glass boot. The dwarf painting Hitler's portrait. Hitler's fucking CAPE.

The only thing that really confused me about the movie was its title. Not the misspelling of "bastards" but the decision to name the film after such minor characters. The team is introduced early in the film but few of them have any lines and none of them are on screen for very long. I suppose a few of them are integral to the finale but without giving anything away, there's a larger story at work which they are completely independent of. They are largely forgettable as characters with the exception of Donny and perhaps Hugo.

The real star of the film, both from a character and acting point of view, is Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz). He's mesmerizing and I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've ever used that word (I had no idea how to spell it). From his conversation with the dairy farmer to his strudel moment to his extended laughter in the theater lobby to his last moment on screen, I could not take my eyes off of him. Here's a guy who has never been in a Hollywood movie before, playing a goddamn Nazi, and yet he's so charming he's almost sympathetic. He owns every scene that he's in, easily outshining Brad Pitt for sure. I hope when the time comes he is lauded like no other actor has been lauded before.

So yeah, I love the movie. Loved it. I spent the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday just thinking about how much I loved it. I didn't have much else to do at the time, which helped.

On Monday I made a hell of a long trek down to southern Osaka (yes, past KIX) for a gaming party thrown by fellow JET Graham. With the baby around and my relative isolation from other JETs, I suppose it was also the closest thing I'd have to a birthday party this year, so I was pretty excited about it. I was among the first people to arrive although my unfashionable earliness was intentional. Since it was so far away I knew I'd be leaving pretty early, so I wanted to get in as much gaming/socializing as I could before making the trek back home.

Graham's setup was really impressive. There was a big screen TV with a PS3 and all variants of plastic instruments hooked up in the main room of the party, which obviously spent most of the afternoon engaging in one kind of music game or another. However there was also a Wii and an Xbox in additional rooms, plus a computer with all sorts of emulators and two gamepads. Truly, there was something for everyone.

The first game I played was one I was kind of excited about, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Graham and I played through the entire first world together, taking advantage of the game's simultaneous co-op mode. It's funny how easy it was to accept a two-player Mario game even though it's a completely new experience in the twenty-five year history of the franchise. Sure, we got in each other's way a few times and maybe he grabbed a mushroom that totally should have been mine, but for the most part we were working together in delightful ways. Your characters have a lot of interactivity potential, from bouncing on one another to outright picking up another player and throwing him.

My biggest complaint was, sadly, my predominant one with Wii games: controls. The Wiimote does not feel comfortable when held sideways. It might resemble a classic controller in that position but it certainly doesn't feel like one. Also, the inclusion of motion controls (shaking, twisting, etc) is downright obnoxious. I understand the fun of pretending to swing a baseball bat or a golf club, Nintendo, but don't force me to jerk my hands around just to spin jump. Considering how often the simplicity of Wii controls is touted, this strikes me as a grievous miscalculation. Still, if I can convince Mako to try it I will absolutely buy this game for our home.

Next up was an "oldie" (from five months ago) that I had been very curious about, Prototype. You might remember it hit shelves around the same time as inFAMOUS did with a very similar premise: ordinary dude gets extraordinary powers in an open-world city environment. While inFAMOUS had a demo (which I absolutely detested) Prototype did not and I didn't really hear enough glowing praise to make me take a chance on it. I was also in the middle of BioShock at the time and, let's face it, that's a hard game to put down.

I'm happy to report that Prototype is a lot of fun. It opens in medias res with your character Alex rampaging in Times Square. There are soldiers, tanks, helicopters and mutant things all around you and none of them are friendly. There are also hundreds of civilians, taxi cabs and other elements that are neutral towards you but you are free to dispatch them if you feel like it. Indeed, a well-aimed automobile is the easiest way to take down a gunship.

The carnage abruptly ends and you return to the start of the story with Alex waking up in a morgue. While many of the outrageous powers you just used are no longer available, Alex is still perfectly capable of leaping tall obstacles and running up the sides of buildings. The game gives you a few quick objectives (elude the military, find Alex's sister) but it quickly opens up and lets you do whatever the hell you want. I spent a good half-hour or so running around (and up) Manhattan fooling around with Alex's super powers. There is a Grand Theft Auto-esque warning system where you can attract the authorities' attention by acting suspiciously, but it's refreshingly lax. It wasn't until I started smashing police cars together that anyone seemed to take notice and even then a few minutes of not acting like a monster was enough to make everyone calm down. Compare that to GTA IV where I swear a single bump of a patrol car can force you into a high-speed chase.

I suppose the big moment of the day was when I caved to peer pressure and picked up a fake guitar to play Beatles Rock Band. I am absolutely terrible at rhythm games and would have been much more comfortable grabbing a microphone instead, but my throat was pretty raw from coughing all day so I was in no condition to sing. At the very least, I can handle the bass on the Easy setting as there's only three buttons to worry about. I had fun despite my gross incompetence, especially as the game allows for up to six players (three on instruments, three on vocals) and we had more than enough willing participants for that.

The overall party experience was most pleasant. I am, as always, a poor mingler but I had a few nice conversations about games while indulging in junk food and many glasses of Coca-Cola. I honestly came home feeling like a kid because that about summarizes most of the parties I attended in my youth. The only thing missing was the pizza and the chance of a sleepover.

So to sum it all up, I ate delicious Chinese food and saw the best movie of 2009 on Saturday, lounged around the apartment on Sunday, then gorged myself on games and snacks on Monday. Pretty great weekend if I say so myself. And hey, I just realized that I'm flying home in a month!

Labels: Beatles Rock Band, but I love gatherings, Inglorious Basterds, movies, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Osaka, poor health, Prototype, PS3, video games, Wii, Xbox

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The Tokyo Game Show is certainly Japan's largest gaming exhibition, but it's not the only event that's open to the public. Here in Osaka, the eighth annual Games Japan Festa took place last weekend. It may have lacked the bombastic spectacle of TGS but it was free and it was not without its charms.

To be sure, Games Japan Festa is a much smaller gathering with a much different focus. TGS is a business event first and a public event second, and the crowds that show up take gaming seriously. At GJF, there were no press conferences, no giant video screens, no real booths to speak of and I only saw one cosplayer all day.

Instead, GJF kept things simple. Far from the gargantuan excesses of TGS, GJF was housed entirely in a single room roughly the size of a gymnasium. Most games were simply shown on wall-mounted televisions without any statues or spinning lights to dazzle the senses. The room was also much quieter, with no music being broadcast and not a single megaphone in sight.

A large number of the games on display at GJF were already on sale, either here in Japan or overseas (or both). In many cases, the software was not a demo version but was the real deal, monitored by a staff member and reset for each player. I felt bad for the people playing Batman Arkham Asylum who had to walk through the entire prison entrance scene.

Microsoft had the largest installation and was the only exhibitor to recruit booth babes, though the word "booth" doesn't seem appropriate. It very much had the look of the TGS space but it was quite open and spread out with no clear division between it and the neighboring displays. There were a few stand-up demo kiosks around the perimeter but most of the gaming stations came with seats. The Tekken 6 display even included joysticks rather than gamepads.

If there is one word that describes GJF perfectly, it is "casual." The event was well attended but was never crowded, and people lined up to play games but without any of the epic waits that visitors to TGS must endure. The attendees were also much more varied than the typical TGS attendees. I saw plenty of young couples, families with small children, even single women. On the day I attended, a popular radio duo appeared on the stage and the entire room filled with the squeals of their female fans. It was the noisiest the show floor ever got.

From a news standpoint, there wasn't much on display at Games Japan Festa that I hadn't seen before but I found a few curiosities that weren't shown at TGS and wrote about them for Game|Life.

Local developer SNK didn't make the trip to Tokyo this year but they were at last week's event, showing off Metal Slug XX and a new 3D Samurai Shodown game.

I played Umihara Kawase for the first time on the DS. It's kind of like Bionic Commando without all that shooting.

I only played two Western games at the show, Avatar and Left 4 Dead 2. I didn't bother writing anything about the second one because I don't know what else I can say about it. Between my preview at TGS and our discussion on The DoFuss Show I think I've exhausted myself of L4D2 opinions.

The only possible thing I could add is that at the show I played it in Japanese for the first time and it was a mess because everything is subtitled rather than dubbed. This means that when the shit hits the fan and everyone starts shouting, the screen is filled with text. What a waste of visual real estate!

In other news, I just got my first check from Wired today. That means I am now, officially, a professional writer. Feels pretty cool. Now all I have to do is figure out how to deposit it in my US bank account, because Japanese banks don't do checks. But hey, it's still a first step, right? Right.

Labels: Games Japan Festa, Left4Dead, Osaka, video games, Wired, writing

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Quite a week, that. Three days of teaching (two in my biggest, unfriendliest school) plus two days attending the JET mid-year seminar. It was a nice break from my usual routine and I did enjoy having a chance to go into the city instead of heading out into the countryside. And hey, free calligraphy lesson

This year's seminar was a little different/scarier because I had to deliver a presentation of my own: "Juggling Elementary Schools." I guess I should have seen this coming. After years of complaining that the JET Programme didn't do enough to address the unique issues of elementary schools, it seems I have become the best person to actually talk about those issues. I just wish I had a time machine to go back to 2007 and deliver this workshop to myself because I was still nervous as hell back then.

Funny sidenote: when I was first contacted to deliver this presentation, I was standing on the floor of the Tokyo Game Show back in September. Talk about worlds colliding!

And while we're talking games, I should mention that I went to Games Japan Festa 2009 in Osaka on Saturday. The show lasted two days but to be frank, it was a small show. I will be writing a few things about it for Wired Game|Life but anything that I don't cover there I will report on right here.

And as long as we're on the subject, my story on dessert-dispensing crane games went live on that site late last week. Go on and have a read if you didn't already. For the record I did not win anything in the two separate visits I made but I would absolutely consider going again if I had company, hopefully in the form of someone good at crane games. I want pudding, damn it!

Labels: JET, Osaka, teaching, video games, Wired

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I've fallen ill again. No big deal, it's clearly just a cold (and a mild one at that) but a stuffy head is a stuffy head so I've been feeling pretty tired the last twenty-four hours or so. Mako took Go to her parents' house, giving me a little peace and quiet which is nice. I know the baby has to get a cold someday but there's no need to rush things.

Unfortunately, my cold arrived at the same time as Alex's friend Darren arrived from the UK. Alex had talked to me about a variety of activities with his friend/podcast partner so I was really looking forward to the visit even though (or maybe because) I've never actually met or spoken to Darren myself. Since I wasn't feeling so bad yesterday and I really had an errand to run in Osaka anyway, I put on a surgical mask (when in Japan...) and went into the city to meet them.

I won't get into what exactly we did because I know Alex has plans to make audio/video materials out of it for his website, but I will say that at his house there was a kind of rapid-fire session featuring a number of video games, some that I knew but many that I never played before. Alex keeps himself very busy on the gaming front and he had a number of brand new shrink wrapped titles just ready to be played, yet he still bought Halo ODST while we were in Den Den Town. It was only 3000 Yen - a bargain for a new game, especially in Japan - but I am envious of the amount of material he has at his fingertips.

Once thing I will talk about is Burnout Paradise, a game that has kept itself in the mass gaming conversation for nearly two years now. At first I ignored it because, quite frankly, I loathe racing games. It's a genre that I've never accepted at home or in the arcades because the experience never feels right to me. Even when there's a steering wheel to play with (which helps in the "feel" department) there's this gigantic gap between what I do and what the car does on screen. It doesn't help that most racing games are as shallow as possible, consisting of nothing but roaring engines and turns turns turns. Of course, I've never been much of a "car guy" which makes most of what happens in the game completely uninteresting to me.

And yet Burnout Paradise blew me away. Darren did most of the playing but as I sat and watched I found myself actually getting excited. The big difference, as I see it, is Burnout Paradise gives you an entire city to play around in. Yes, there are races you can run, but there are other events for the choosing like "road rage," an impromptu demolition derby that has you crashing into sports cars on the streets rather than inside an arena.

More importantly, the city is just there for you to explore. Most of the time we weren't doing anything but screeching around corners and looking for things to smash into. Crashing in normal racing games is a drag, a failure, something that forces you to go back and redo the whole race from the start. In Burnout Paradise you are constantly wrecking your car in awesome slow-motion and all that happens is you "respawn" with your car somewhat restored to working order.

Alex made the comparison to the Grand Theft Auto series with the caveat that you never leave your car (though you can change vehicles in designated locations). I would posit that, based on the brief experience I've had so far, Burnout Paradise is better than GTA because it strips away the drama and violence while still offering an open world for vehicular mischief. There are no people in this city, only vehicles. It's like living inside a Hot Wheels track only the toy cars move a lot faster and can easily be replaced no matter how many times you crash them into a wall at high speeds.

The best news about Burnout Paradise is that Alex gave me a copy of the game for free. Somehow he ended up with two versions of the game (one on PlayStation, one on Xbox) so he handed me the Xbox one and told me to keep it. The downside is that there's no way for the two of us to play together now but the upside is that I have something new to enjoy that smashes my own assumptions about the genre. Few things are as exciting in life as discovering something that you thought you hated but is actually really cool. I haven't been this surprised by my own tastes since I learned to enjoy green vegetables.

Oh one last thing on the subjects of games and Alex. After I wrote about The Fountainhead last week, I uploaded a slightly different version of the piece to Bitmob, adding a few paragraphs to discuss the connections between the book and BioShock. Today I learned that my work was featured in a Spotlight post alongside an item that Alex had written. Small world!

Labels: Alex, BioShock, Bitmob, Burnout Paradise, Den Den Town, friends, GTA, Osaka, The Fountainhead, video games, writing, Xbox

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We've all heard the predictions: Digital Distribution is The Future of Gaming. Not only do all three major home consoles offer downloadable titles via their online stores, including past games that were once only available on physical media, the PSPGo will soon hit the streets without a slot for a cartridge or a disc. Meanwhile, Steam and a dozen services just like it are delivering games, new and old, to eager PC customers, further decreasing the ever-shrinking PC game share of retail shelf space. There's even OnLive, the magical "cloud" gaming device that threatens to eliminate all consoles and graphics cards in the ethereal future. The naysayers question the penetration of broadband Internet and point to the nebulous issues that digital rights management and end-user license agreements will bring in the all-digital age, but I offer a simpler counterpoint:

Super Potato.

For those unaware, Super Potato is a videogame store in Japan. There's more than one outlet but it's not a chain on par with Softmap or Yodobashi Camera. The shop I frequent is located at the outskirts of Osaka's Den Den Town and is sandwiched in between two similar-looking stores. Aside from the silly name it's quite easy for the uninitiated to take one look at it and decide it's just another game store before walking off to the nearby subway station.

Certainly, the first floor offers nothing out of the ordinary; their display of Wii and DS games spills out of the shop and onto the sidewalk because those are the hot properties in Japan right now. Even if you step inside, you'll be greeted by the usual Japanese videogame retail environment. The narrow shelves are packed with games (new and used) and there's the din of non-stop advertising, both from full-size TVs and from mini-monitors on the shelves themselves. There's not enough room to bend over to look at the bottom shelves, but if you're quick you can squat down and stand back up before someone accidentally steps on your hand.

It is on the second floor of Super Potato where all the magic is kept. Just climbing a few steps is enough to drown out the aggressive noise of the first floor with the charming tones of the 8-bit Famicom. There's a TV in the stairwell that runs a (seemingly) never-ending countdown of classic Nintendo games. Whether these are best-sellers, fan favorites or simply a random, nostalgia-driven assortment, I couldn't say because I've never asked. What I do know is that I always linger on those stairs to see what's "playing." It doesn't matter if it's a game I remember or one I've never heard of, because I am entertained either way.

The top of the stairs might as well be a time machine, because the entire floor is dedicated to retro gaming. The layout is similar to the floor below: there's still lots of TV screens and impossibly cramped conditions, but while the first floor is a cacophony the atmosphere of the second floor couldn't be more inviting. For starters, the shift from plastic and metal shelves to wooden panels is much warmer and soothing to the eyes. Likewise, the TVs don't show advertisements for games, they just show games. Some you can play, others are just demos, but both serve as a more honest and direct representation of gaming than any commercial.

And then there's the games: thousands and thousands of games. There's a rainbow-colored assortment of Famicom games on one shelf and stark-white rows of PlayStation games on another. Grey Super Famicom cartridges, golden Sega Saturn CD cases, massive black Neo Geo ROM carts, every console of the past twenty-five years has a shelf to call its own. I remember once seeing an entire arcade joystick board for sale, ripped from its cabinet and modified to work on a home console. I would have been tempted to buy it if it hadn't been larger than my dining room table.

For me, the main attraction is actually the "shelf of dreams" as I call it: all the consoles one needs to play the games in the store, individually shrink wrapped (or occasionally in the box) and stacked to the ceiling. I stare at it and think of all the birthdays, holidays and special occasions that these devices represented. I spent months saving my allowance whenever I wanted to buy a new console. Now I can look at this shelf and, with whatever cash I've got on me, walk out the door with at least five or six different machines. If I were to hit the ATM first, I could probably buy enough software for three entire childhoods of memories.

In short, Super Potato is love. There are plenty of retro game stores in Japan and at least ten of them are on the same street in Den Den Town, but none of them will tug at your heart, reach into your brain and ignite your passion for videogames like Super Potato can. I'm no longer into collecting but I still go out of my way to visit Super Potato every few months to bask in its warmth and live vicariously through its stockpile of nostalgia. I can go into an arcade and entertain myself by watching the attract modes and other players, but I can put a huge smile on my face just from staring at all the plastic sitting on Super Potato's shelves.

Which brings me to my original point: in a digital distribution retail environment, there won't be a Super Potato. Sure, the Wii and the PlayStation 3 will eventually be stacked on their obsolete console shelf alongside purple Gamecubes and Virtual Boys, but no one's ever going to be reminded of the summer of 2008 by looking at copies of Braid or Mega Man 9. If (when?) discs are ever completely eliminated from the videogame market, then the products we love will never be enshrined in any dedicated store like this. While I admit the online store model is a hell of a lot more organized and convenient for people like me who deplore the tediousness of handling all these discs and boxes, there's no emotional value to be found by pressing "browse by title."

A great example is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a game so beloved it can be found on both the PSN and Xbox LIVE as well as hidden inside Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles on PSP. I've clicked past it on the list of PSOne titles dozens of times without ever putting it in my shopping cart. But when I saw it among used PlayStation games here in Japan, I felt the memories flood my mind and I ended up buying it at twice the cost of PSN if only to play it in Japanese for a change.

Another example is Doom. Thanks to an insane New Year's sale on Steam, I bought the original and its sequel for ninety-nine cents apiece. I've barely touched them in the months since, but how could I resist such a deal? I've spent more than ninety-nine cents on novelty flavored Pepsi, so two of the great PC games of my teenage years was a no-brainer. However, I can promise you that seeing those titles on my list of installed games doesn't have a fraction of the impact that picking it up in my hands does. Whenever I see a used PlayStation version, I immediately recall the night my friends and I gathered all our resources and rented a copy of the game so we could have two PlayStations running on two televisions in order to play co-op mode. It was only one night but I'll never forget the sheer giddiness of the experience as I cackled at seeing my friend's space marine run across my screen.

I am a realist as well as an optimist. I think buying games online and having them "delivered" instantly to my hard drive is a wonderful thing. I resent juggling Blu-ray discs every time I want to watch a movie because I keep BioShock ready to go in my PS3 at all times, so the ease at which I can go from PixelJunk Eden to PixelJunk Monsters is very convenient. Yet the prospect of an all-digital (or all-streaming) future is a bleak one to me because I'll miss the colorful charm of Super Potato, where the games all cost money but the memories are free.

Labels: Castlevania, Den Den Town, Doom, fuzzy memories, Osaka, predicting the future, PS3, video games, Xbox

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So it seems everyone has baby questions for me and the answer to all of them is "soon." The baby will be born soon, Mako will enter the hospital soon, we will formally declare the baby's name soon, and I'm going to be pushed one step closer to adulthood soon. What I can't say is "when" because we simply don't know. But it's soon, that's for sure.

I spent Friday night with Mako at her parents' house again and while that isn't getting any easier, at least I get to sleep. For reasons I cannot explain I have not been sleeping well in my own bed. It could be a simple matter of not having my wife next to me, or maybe it's just stress, but since Mako went back to her childhood home I have barely managed to sleep more than four or five hours at a time. True, I should be going to bed earlier as it is harder to resist TV and video games when you're alone, but even when I lay down before eleven I'll wake up once or twice during the night.

Mako is really caught between her needs and her wants right now. She tells me about things she wants to do all the time, but with all that weight and a new life form squirming around inside her she simply cannot do much of anything without a long rest before, during, and after. Even going to the movies is out of the question for her, which is a shame because she seems interested in Terminator 4 and it's opening in Japan real soon. I would have thought sitting down would be an easy activity in her condition but it seems that she's worried about having to sit STILL for such a long time. Plus she's been having some issues with her feet that are best dealt with by elevating her lower half. There's certainly no room for that in a movie theater.

I really feel torn about how our lives are being wedged apart right now, even if it's only temporary. I can't just go down there everyday because it's too far. I could spend my weekends there but I fear my sanity would snap. There's so much pressure being a guest in someone's house, especially an overnight guest and especially especially one who has to really concentrate to communicate at all. So I've been spending one night a week there and then leaving, even though I feel lonely when I'm at home all by myself. I feel bad when she's not around but I can't manage to be with her for more than eighteen hours or so because there's nothing for us to do. It's a weird Catch-22 and it's entirely in my own head.

At the very least, I didn't spend Saturday night alone. I went out to Osaka and met Alex and another friend of his, Rachel. We didn't really "go" anywhere or "do" anything as much as we went out on the streets and spent the evening together. We found great amusement in people watching in Dotonbori (this trash collector and this apparent performance artist being two of the highlights) and enjoyed a delicious Western-style pizza at nearby Slices in Amerika-mura. Eventually we wandered into a cheapo karaoke joint that had shoddy drink service and questionable song selection but it more than made for it in price. I spent less than 1000 Yen for two hours which is an incredible bargain, especially for a Saturday night. Combine that with our policy of buying drinks in convenience stores rather than bars and we all managed to have a great night without spending much money at all.

Meanwhile, it's Monday again and I find myself still "single" and no closer to understanding when my life will completely change. Will the baby arrive in time for Father's Day? Will it be born during the week? Will it be born tomorrow? Perhaps that's what's keeping me up at night more than anything else. At least when I sleep next to Mako, I know that IF the baby decides to join us, I'll be right by her side. If the baby comes in the middle of the night and we're apart, well, I don't have a car and there are no trains...

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Labels: Alex, family, friends, Osaka, predicting the future, pregnancy

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This week went pretty fast. Being thrown under the bus can make time fly, I suppose.

OK, that's an unfair exaggeration, but it was a long week that left me little time for writing because I had to prepare most of my lessons on the fly. When I made it through last week without any lesson plans, I thought things would be different this week. The only difference was that I had already taught a few classes so I had a better idea of how to handle being underprepared...again. Yes, my Monday school must have been really impressed with how I handled myself last week, because this week they left me hanging again, forcing me to come up with another round of lessons on my own. Thursday was the same story in a different building, only in that school I had done absolutely nothing last week. We could have talked about materials or potential lessons, but instead I got a lot of "sorry we're not ready" apologies. Then I show up this week and they want everything right away.

There's a great line in Fight Club that seems eerily appropriate for describing how these elementary schools think about their English language education: "[it] exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends." Despite all the meetings and e-mails, despite the abundance of technology that allows these folks to communicate with one another (and with me!), it's clear to me that until I walk through the front door of their school each week, I do not exist. What other excuse could there be for them to accomplish absolutely nothing in an entire week between my visits?

Things ended up working out, thanks entirely to me. I feel like an ass even saying it like that, but what other way can I put it? If they're not going to help plan the lessons and they don't help teach the lessons, what other choice do I have? Should I just fail spectacularly once in the hopes that it might convince them to stop leaving everything up to me? Maybe my constant delivery of mediocrity is making them too comfortable. They don't need quality lessons because I'm giving them bland, good-enough lessons without all the bother of having a conversation with me beforehand or, you know, actually teaching their own students. Similarly, I don't want to turn into a proactive taskmaster, calling schools on my own time to convince them to do their jobs, because I assume that will make them do even less on their own. I genuinely believe at this point that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of effort I put in and their reciprocal behavior.

On Monday I have to go back to the tiny mountain school for the first time in over a year. As you might expect, the only I reason I knew I was going there was because I was nosy and I started asking a lot of questions about a note written on the blackboard at my regular Monday school. Turns out they've decided to alternate my lessons between the two schools. Why this information wouldn't be brought to my immediate attention, I have no idea. Again, the meeting took place when I wasn't around, so I did not exist at the time.

But hey, at least the week ended very well. Yesterday I went to the good school and we went on a field trip. The entire student body and a dozen teachers took a long walk up into the mountains and back again. We took frequent breaks, but we were definitely on our feet for at least four hours during the six and a half we were out of the building. I had a lot of fun and the whole outing reminded me of how good things can be when schools welcome me and treat me as a person. This is the same school that regularly invites me to after-work meals - there's one coming up this Tuesday, in fact.

It also helps that I have a very good relationship with the students at this school, although there were a few odd moments yesterday. More than one student expressed shock at hearing me speak Japanese. While I do try to speak as much English as possible in class (a luxury I have only when I get to be the assistant rather than the sole teacher), I have been eating lunch and playing outside with these kids for over a year. I don't use much English at all during those times, yet somehow they've managed to forget all about those Pokemon conversations we've had. There was also one kid who started calling me gaijin and I had to explain to him why that was rude. And the weirdest exchange of all came after one of the new first graders learned I was an American:

Boy: "Do you like war?"
Me: "No, no one likes that!"
Boy: "Then why does America fight wars?"
Me: (declining to explain that I do not get to choose when and how America fights in wars) "Nobody likes war, not even those who fight in them."

But kids will be kids, and I ain't mad at 'em. I figure each time we have to get to know each other over again, we get a little bit closer. I took lots of pictures of the excursion, both with my phone and my regular camera. The small images are visible on my twitpic page while an assortment of the larger ones are in this album on Facebook.

After that very physically demanding day, I went out after dinner to a pub quiz in Osaka. I had gone to a number of these in months past, though last night was my first in quite some time. Things got off to a really great start when I came up with a prize-winning team name. The theme was Australia and New Zealand, and the first thing I thought of was "A Dingo Ate My Kiwi." From there, things stayed solid with a round based entirely on guessing the titles of movies from "literal" drawings. For example, a jar of preserves in orbit = Space Jam. We faltered a bit on the later rounds, and half of our team vanished before the game ended (that happens to me a lot) but we still won with 27 of 42 possible points. The prize was a bottle of cider, but it didn't last because in an instant there were strangers eager to share a glass with me. It's not about the prize anyway, it was about having fun and having a couple drinks. Mission Totally Accomplished!

Took it very easy today, thanks in small part to a downpour that lasted well into the afternoon, but that's OK. I'm a bit pink from being in the sun anyway. I'll leave the house again tomorrow. Don't worry about me, by the way. I complain when things get rough around here but as yesterday shows, the highs more than make up for the lows.

Labels: frustration, JET, Osaka, teaching, workout

つづく...(Click here to read more)

This weekend was extremely lovely, weather-wise, with clear skies and temperatures fast approaching early summer rather than mid-spring. The cherry-blossoms may be gone but that was no excuse to spend my free time sitting indoors! Instead, I went to Osaka on both Saturday and Sunday in a bid to both maintain my visibility socially and prevent myself from being too sedentary. Unfortunately, Mako was only feeling up to one day of city trekking, so I spent one day largely by myself.

Saturday was my day to be alone in Osaka, so I decided to seek out the recently-released King of Fighters XII both out of my own curiosity and for the sake of my soon-to-be arriving friend, The Trout. We both grew up enamored with SNK and their heavy-duty Neo Geo video game system but he was the one who actually owned the damn thing when it was new. I bought mine years later on eBay, long after the console had fallen out of the mainstream and survived on catering to a niche of dedicated enthusiasts with an excess of disposable income. I guess I owe the Post Office a debt of gratitude for funding my Neo Geo fix, because at $90-300 per game it takes a steady paycheck to even consider buying the console in the first place.

KOF XII turned out to be surprisingly tricky to find, but the time it took to track it down was not wasted. I've often mentioned my life-long attachment to video games but there is one aspect to my hobby that I should perhaps make a little clearer. Even though I was an active gamer at home since the early days of Atari, I have always been more fond of arcade games. True, the latter was always more impressive when I was younger due to the differences in available technology (see the infamously dodgy Atari version of Pac-Man as evidence), but even now as an adult, I can spend hours perusing arcades for fun.

While arcades in the United States are virtually dead, they are certainly still alive and reasonably active here in Japan. There are dozens of "game centers" in Osaka and having no way of knowing where I might see KOF (a quick Internet search didn't turn up any assistance), I simply went to Umeda and starting visiting all the ones that I knew existed, finding a few in the process that I never went to before.

Most of what I saw when I wasn't finding what I wanted was familiar stuff, at least to anyone who's been to a Japanese game center before. There were an abundance of non-video games, including UFO catchers, slot machines, and photo booths. Despite the cramped conditions, each game center had several massive interlocked games for horse-racing enthusiasts, card-based strategy gamers, and even mysterious "pods" for those who want to pilot giant robots.

Of course, there were plenty of more traditional games as well, but they tended to be older. Many of the arcade games my friends and I enjoyed in high school are still eating coins in Japan to this day. Hell, games I played as a little boy are still on the floors here. I saw what I assume (no, PRAY) was a father and son playing Bubble Bobble together. Not a revised edition or HD Remix, just plain old Bubble Bobble like I had on my NES twenty years ago. Speaking of Nintendo, yes, you can still play Super Mario Bros. in Japanese arcades. Funny how certain games can launch scores of imitators and innovative sequels but the original game holds a certain cachet that people refuse to abandon.

One of the newer and fairly unusual games I saw was a Castlevania arcade game that plays kind of like a shooting game, except you wave a Wiimote-like controller around to strike the enemies. I had to play it because it was so different and because I am a big fan of the series. I didn't have much fun with it, but I wonder how much of that was my failure to understand the five screens of instructions that preceded the game. I found the idea of a short-range weapon and an on-rails shooter (that is, you cannot control your character's movements, only attacks) to be an uncomfortable mix. Usually a game like this relies on quick reflexes to shoot the monsters as soon as they appear on screen. Instead, this game forces you to wait for them to come closer in order to hit them. You do have long-range weapons, but they are weak and limited in number. Most of the game I held my "wand" at the ready and just waited for the shambling skeletons to shuffle a but closer so I could slash at them. It was tense in that respect but not nearly as entertaining as shooting games like the Rambo game I played last fall (which I also this weekend, but did not play since I was alone).

I did manage to track down King of Fighters XII, but there isn't much news I can report. The game has only been out a couple weeks but, predictably, the regular players have already settled into a comfort zone that makes them basically invincible. While I can barely make sense of the new techniques ("critical counter" means nothing to me and there appear to be SFIV-like focus attacks as well), these guys are all set and look like they've been playing for years. So I had little choice but to just watch them and try to take what I could from their extremely fast-paced play.

The roster is much larger since I played the game at TGS, but these guys have already settled on a few select characters that they like. Add to that the fact that there's really no "new" characters - all of them have appeared in previous games - and I didn't see much that anyone who looks up this stuff online hasn't seen for themselves. The only thing that has changed significantly is the on-screen display, as the game now features a traditional "power" meter along with a mysterious "critical counter" gauge that I did not understand. When it fills up, it immediately starts to tick away, so I suppose it offers players a narrow window of opportunity to do...some kind of counter attack. These guys were using it to launch into long combinations of attacks, but whether that's automatic or just them being awesome, I couldn't say.

Having seen what I wanted to see, I moved on to Shinsaibashi where I met a few friends for an evening of pool with Alex and a pair of ALTs. I am, of course, awful at the game but no one cared. We arrived during happy hour and had an extended session where the four of us played round after round without any competition but ourselves. Eventually we decided to make things "interesting" by having losers buy shots for the winners, but our games were so back-and-forth that we abandoned our wagers and simply all chipped in for a plateful of shots that we did together. Amazingly, the mix of drinks went down rather uneventfully for me and I wasn't even hungover the next morning.

Funny how I spent an entire day playing games in one way or another. I can't deny having more fun when my friends were involved, but in a way both my solitary afternoon and my socially-active evening were both tremendously satisfying. If only I had a way to include more people in the arcade-prowling, it would have been a really special day. Good thing I've got a like-minded partner coming to Japan next Friday!

Labels: Alex, friends, KOF, Osaka, video games

つづく...(Click here to read more)

I'm sitting at work right now in a nearly empty staff room, wearing my coat and waiting for Spring. Looking out the window, I can see the pink and white flowers just beginning to poke their way into the world. I welcome their arrival.

I had a very pleasant weekend and I feel good about nearly everything that happened. If anything, there were times where I could have had less fun and I would have had just as good a time in hindsight. So you could say that my only regrets are enjoying myself too much, as if there is some finite supply of happiness in my life and I squandered it.

Saturday was my day to go out and spend time with friends while Mako relaxed at home. It was also, not coincidentally, the opening day of Watchmen here in Japan. I mentioned just last week my enthusiasm for this film and of Mako's evident indifference to it. Picking up on her coolness and anticipating another drawn out experience where she doesn't just tell me she's uninterested in seeing it in theaters, I made it simple for her. I told her I wanted to see the movie on opening day and asked if she wanted to go. She didn't, and I did.

But not alone! I met up with Alex to eat lunch and then watch the film. Over some spicy Thai-style pizza in Namba, we talked about games, his upcoming podcast, and the new T-shirt line at Uniqlo. He also revealed that he has not yet read the original Watchmen story but is, in fact, in the midst of reading it now. I don't think I've ever seen a movie based on a book I was actively reading at the time, but I suppose it can't be much different than going into the movie blind.

The movie was preceded by two trailers for American films which I am still thinking about two days later. The first was the new Terminator movie which I cannot begin to understand. The original film and its stunning sequel were fantastic and continue to linger in my mind as two of my favorite science-fiction stories. The third, for all its flaws, was an enjoyable romp that ended very well. Considering its very existence nullified the solid ending of T2, T3 spun a remarkably appropriate conclusion for itself that improved my view of the entire film.

While I am a sucker for good time travel stories, the real appeal of the first three Terminator films was rooted in a gritty contemporary setting. All three showed visions of humanity's nightmarish future and the war with the machines, but the story was firmly modern-day and a good deal of the tension revolved around that restriction. The heroes often lament that the technology available to them in the 80s and 90s is insufficient to take down a superior foe. Likewise, the Terminator itself experiences routine setbacks when forced to constrain itself to the society it seeks to destroy. The Terminator films have always been fish out of water stories where the two fish are trying to kill each other.

So what does the T4 trailer offer viewers? Explosions and giant robots with Christian Bale shouting at people. This is (apparently) an entire movie dedicated to those short segments in the earlier films where everyone has laser blasters and is covered in grime. Maybe someone out there saw those scenes and said "Man, when are they gonna tell me the rest of that story?" Whoever that guy might be, he's not me or any of my immediate friends. Hell, most of them thought T3 went off the rails into Silly Town. While I managed to enjoy it, I can't say the new movie appeals to me at all. I may rent it if only to bring some context to the awkward audio clip of Christian Bale chewing out a guy on the set. I just need to know what he was doing at the time.

The second trailer was also full of explosions and giant robots because it was for the new Transformers movie. This falls squarely into the category of "fool me once, shame on you/fool me twice, shame on me." I knew the first film would be awful and despite all my efforts to lower my expectations and open my mind to the possibility of it being dumb fun ("my efforts" largely consisting of drinking heavily before going to the theater that day), it was even worse than I could have imagined. The new film seems to have learned nothing from the first, as everything I saw was nigh-incomprehensible. Even by movie trailer standards the action was splintered and disjointed, which is exactly what ruined the first movie for me. Well, that and draping a dull-as-fuck high school romance over the entire story. But what do I know? The movie was a huge hit and plenty of people I know and respect managed to enjoy it. Go on without me fellas.

After all that noise and dubiousness, the movie I actually paid to see began. Watchmen surprised me right away with two curious choices. The murder of The Comedian became a spirited fight scene and there was actually an opening credits sequence (a rare sight in action movies). The fight scene represents my biggest problem with the adaptation while the credits got me excited to see the rest of the story unfold. Those initial few minutes turned out to be a microcosm of everything I liked and didn't like about the movie.

As the fight scene demonstrated, everyone's a bad-ass in the Watchmen movie. The Comedian is supposed to be a tough guy who's way past his prime, yet he's punching through walls and getting up after having his head smashed into tables. His mystery assailant is likewise incredibly strong and fast and the two of them duel with rapid-fire punches and kicks rather than brawling. Later in the film, all of the heroes demonstrate that they are incredibly gifted martial artists and gymnasts rather than just being motivated to fight crime while wearing costumes. This transformation of the "costumed vigilantes" to legitimate superheroes is Watchmen's greatest translation error. The original story was dedicated to deflating the comic book hero by showing his (and her) flaws. These characters still have their problems but completely devastating regular people isn't one of them.

On the other hand, the opening credits demonstrated a real affection for the original comic by delivering a slick, streamlined history lesson of the major events that precede the "present day," which in Watchmen is 1985. This is what the movie unquestionably gets right; it preserves the overall story of the original and presents it in a modern comic book movie aesthetic. Even if the action seems out of place from a logical perspective, I could not deny that I still got caught up in the excitement. Director Zach Snyder has given us hyper-real action setpieces before, but only in Watchmen is there a story worth telling alongside all the slow-motion combat. And while his bright ideas for "improving" 300 were laughably bad, Watchmen survives the inevitable hurdles of adaptation and actually thrives.

Rather than detail things I noticed about the movie being different than the original, I will simply point you to this article in The A.V. Club that goes through both works in their entirety. It's been a few years since I read the comic and I hadn't recalled exactly who did what to whom. Watching Watchmen has reminded me of why I was excited about the movie at all and I feel compelled to revisit the comic to make my own comparisons now. That may be the best thing anyone can say about an adaptation: it doesn't require you to know the entire backstory and watching the movie should encourage you to read the original afterward.

After the movie Alex and I swung by Uniqlo to check out some of the new video game themed T-shirts they're offering now. All of the shirts are cool but the only one I wanted (among those that are on sale now) is their Resident Evil T-shirt that is nothing but a list of enemy names. Unfortunately, they had no XL-size shirts and only one L-size which Alex claimed. I am torn between going to their website to buy one or just waiting for more shirts to come out so I can buy all of them at once, which will likely lower the per-shirt price. My only worry is that hesitation will result in the shirts disappearing, as Japan has a tendency to offer new and incredibly cool things for a limited time. I'm still waiting for the White Chocolate Maple Kit-Kats I ate in 2005 to make a return to the shelves.

With our (ok, HIS) shopping done, Alex ran off to handle his own affairs while I wondered what to do next. I sat down for some dinner and called Kazu out of the blue. I had debated for a while whether or not it would be "right" to just call him and see what he was doing. I don't know why I treated the whole situation like some kind of first date. Kazu is someone I've known for years; there's no reason to be anxious about calling him on the phone. As it turned out he was shopping in Umeda and he was eager to meet. We had a few drinks at the same bar we hit last week before parting ways around 10.

(This post has turned out longer than I expected but I'm just going to continue rather than cut the story in half)

Spending all day (and night) out on Saturday made me more eager to spend Sunday relaxing at home with Mako. We had lunch at a little place called "Kitchen Pot" that we had been meaning to try for a long time and it turned out to be really good. The portions were large and the prices were more than reasonable. There was a friendly vibe to the place that I dare say had something to do with their choice of oldies music. I got burned out on those tunes due to continuous over-exposure during my time in the post office, but something about hearing Elvis' "Return to Sender" again made me smile.

After our meal and some shopping, we settled in for the last day of the sumo tournament. It didn't end so well as many of the wrestlers I like ended up losing or just finishing with poor records. I was especially down about the final yokozuna match. Even though Hakuho had already secured the championship, I still wanted to see Asashoryu beat him to spoil his unblemished record and save some face. It didn't happen. Drat.

For dinner we tried making nachos again. We are slowly but surely getting the hang of the taste but we need to work on our form. As seen here last week, our nachos take the shape of a burial mound with the chips smothered in a heap of toppings. Last night's version turned out the same way, except we added guacamole and sour cream to the mix. The results were delicious but we still needed to dig our way through to the chips beneath. Mako said she was full halfway through and I pretended to be disappointed in her. Meanwhile, I could barely fit another bite into my mouth but I soldiered on to avoid the nasty leftovers we would end up with. I think "burial mound nachos" is a good name for our dish because if we keep eating like this we'll both be dead in six months.

With both of us beyond satiated we collapsed onto the couch with nothing to do. I received the green light to play video games and decided to finally try the last level of Resistance 2. While playing too much of the enormously entertaining co-op mode got me into trouble in January, I have been quietly making my way through the single player mode over the past few months. I can't say I was into the story or the characters, but I did find the game provided me with enough thrills and big "moments" to keep me coming back for more.

The basic premise (bald space marine fights aliens) is beyond cliche at this point, but Resistance 2 has its share of action setpieces that made the experience worth it. I remember coming out of an underground bunker and seeing San Francisco burn while a massive enemy fleet hung in the sky above. I remember going through abandoned homes and dark warehouses that were full of nasty zombie-like creatures gestating in pods. I remember fighting a skyscraper-sized foe in Chicago who found my rocket launcher more of an annoyance than anything else, but shooting him in the face with it was enough to convince him to throw me through an glass-enclosed catwalk and onto another building five blocks away.

Unfortunately, the ending of the game didn't offer much in the way of memories. In fact, my memory was a hindrance because playing the final level made me think back to earlier stages and older, better games I had once played. Sure, it was really cool to look out the window of that Louisiana estate and see what looked like a fire-breathing dinosaur stalking me. I also got a kick out of fighting my way onto a large steamboat and going cabin to cabin looking for monsters. But the entire finale of storming the mothership with a nuclear bomb in tow felt exactly the same as the mission where I flew an enemy craft into another vessel and set off charges on the bridge. Both had me explore metallic alien corridors and then make a "daring" escape while a clock ticked down in the corner of my screen before flying away with just seconds to spare.

The final showdown with a flying psychic cephalopod was uninteresting at best and lacked all the polish of previous boss fights, even the really hard ones. Fighting a giant alien swarm halfway through the game had been so frustrating I actually got angry, but at least it was something new. The last boss encounter didn't offer a challenge so much as it did closure. You see him escape capture in the first level and then you get to put him down in the last one. Justice/vengeance is served, ho-hum.

The actual ending cinema of the game was abrupt, extremely anti-climactic and could have been handled much better. I thought I had reached the "bad ending" because I played the game too slowly. The main character is trying to finish his mission before the alien virus in his body destroys his humanity, so I thought I missed the deadline. According to the Internet, that's the only ending there is.

Having said all that, I will not dismiss Resistance 2 for its lackluster conclusion. The single player game was more than adequate and the co-op mode was genuinely exciting in ways I would never have expected. Hell, it still is genuinely exciting, I just don't have much time to play online anymore. I feel like taking a break from shooting aliens for a while...right after I finish Half-Life.

To get back to my point (huh? oh, right..."too much fun"), this weekend I ate more food than I needed to, stayed out drinking when I could have gone home, and kept plugging away at a video game to reach the end rather than put down the controller and finish it the next day. I say this not because I think I made the wrong choices, but rather to remind myself of how fortunate I am. There's nothing wrong with a little excess after a long week of not working.

Hey, speaking of work, it's almost time to get going. I wouldn't want to miss that one o'clock bus home.

Labels: Alex, comic books, food, friends, Kazu, movies, Osaka, PS3, Resistance 2, sports, sumo, video games

つづく...(Click here to read more)

No, that's not a typo. May is looking to be off the shelf. No, that's not it, rack, off the rack. That is the expression for "unbridled excitement" that I am looking for.

Things are looking pretty good here in March too. Spring is definitely starting to poke its head out and deliver the occasional really nice day. After Saturday's disaster outing I hung around with Alex in Den Den Town, buying myself a joystick for Street Fighter IV (and any other fighting games that may surface this year). I was initially nervous about how to tell Mako given her over-reaction to my video game shopping habits. This is a woman who fretted over my purchase of Noby Noby BOY, a game that costs less than a McDonald's combo meal. In the end, I decided honestly was the best policy and she was not at all concerned by the 4500 Yen expense. Indeed, by framing it as a potential training tool that would make her entry into this world a little easier, she almost seemed excited. Almost.

But this post is about May and the incredible potential it holds for excitement. My uncle* recently told me via Facebook that his son Josh would be coming to "the Orient" in May and would be in Japan at some point. Now I haven't seen Josh in at least six years so I don't know what he's up to or why he would come to Japan or who he is coming with. All I know is he is my cousin and I hope I can be of assistance in some way should he pass through Osaka. I know he likes baseball; perhaps I can score us some Tigers tickets.

*Yes, a surprising number of people in my family are on Facebook, including one uncle, countless cousins, Salena and even my mother! Don't think Dad is going to ever get on board though.

Then, over this weekend, I got an e-mail out of the blue from Michael, a friend of Hyde's who I met a few years ago. Turns out that Michael is getting married soon and has decided to honeymoon here in Japan. It sounds like he is going to see　as much of the country as he and his new wife can manage in a week, so I can't be sure how much time he will spend in this area. But I certainly volunteered to show the two of them around should they hit Kansai. At the very least they should see Kyoto; perhaps I can show them around the womb.

But this is all icing on a very, very sweet cake. After years of not-so-quiet encouragement and pleading on my part, The Trout is coming to Japan for the first time! I view this as no mere vacation. It was his (and Scott's) initial interest in Japan and study of Japanese that lured me to take night classes at The Japan Society. This experience led me directly to my initial 2001 visit to Miyagi Prefecture, which in turn planted the seed that eventually grew into a desire to return to college so I could qualify for the JET Programme. This is all in addition to being my friend since elementary school and shaping my personality and sense of humor over the last twenty-plus years. As far as I'm concerned, he is ultimately responsible for who I am today: a happily married man with a steady job teaching English in Japan. Were it not for his interest in Japan, my own buried fascination might never have surfaced.

Now I have no way of knowing how The Trout will react to Japan when he finally sees it with his own eyes. He may be put off by all the noise or the staring (he's 6'5"). He may be underwhelmed by the sights or the people. Whatever his feelings towards Japan are now, they are his own and do not confirm or invalidate mine. But considering the impact he has had on my life, I must admit that I am simultaneously excited beyond all reason and more than a little nervous. I want him to come away from this trip with the best impression possible. Not so he'll feel obliged to come back soon (though he is always welcome), but so he'll see what it is that I love about this country.

In a way (and I know this sounds weird but it's too late to back out now) this is similar to what I felt when my father first came to Japan. He didn't have the same interest in the country, culture or language that I did, but I knew how he loved history, particularly military history, and I felt it was important that I make the trip as interesting for him as I could. I guess I also wanted him to be proud of me for getting by in a foreign country that I had been talking about non-stop for years.

With friends, of course, it's different than with family. I wasn't excited to go drinking with my dad, and I certainly didn't want to facilitate any hook-ups with the natives. Likewise, I don't go out with The Trout hoping he'll be impressed by what I'm up to or proud of what I've accomplished. I just want to have fun with him because that's something we simply don't get to do at all anymore. If I wanted my father to see how far I had come, I want my relationship with my friends to go back to the times when we saw each other constantly rather than once or twice a year. The goals are complete opposites but the anxiety I feel is more or less the same.

So YES, May looks hot. Real hot. So much to consider and plan for. So many questions! Where should we go? What should we eat? How much sleep am I willing to forgo?

Labels: Den Den Town, family, friends, Japan, Osaka, tourism, video games

つづく...(Click here to read more)

Tragedy + technology * information = fun!

When I was first told in January about the "disaster preparedness tour" the JET Programme had arranged, my reaction was anything but excited. It was on a Saturday morning, meaning I would have to wake up with my alarm clock on a weekend (the horror!) and the dry description just wasn't appealing. I would have missed the deadline to sign-up had it not been an idle conversation with my supervisor on the last day to request a slot. Thank goodness I volunteered to go, because it was both informative and wildly entertaining.

The event was held at the Disaster Prevention Center "Life Safety Learning Center" in Abeno near Tennoji. Riding the subway downtown, my hopes were still low and I didn't know what to expect (remember what I said about expectations?) so I was a little worried about what we would do all morning. Would it just be a meeting in an office? Would there be little more than a list of items I should have on hand in the event of an emergency? In other words, could I have skipped the entire outing and slept in had they just e-mailed me their spiel?

I knew I had made the right call as soon as I saw the building. In a neighborhood full of apartment buildings and construction crews building new apartment buildings, the Center stood out with a eye-grabbing rounded front. My first instinct was to make an Aperture Science joke, but given the company I was in I figured it would fall flat. Still, as first impressions go this building had totally won me over. Its overall newness and sciencey-look had convinced me this would be worth it, if for no other reason than I suddenly had hopes there would an earthquake simulator.

Turns out there wasn't an earthquake simulator - there were two! The first was the opening of our tour. We sat in a theater and watched a brief movie about earthquakes in Osaka when - what are the odds? - an "earthquake" interrupted the movie. Once our seats stopped rocking we "evacuated" into a kitchen where we had to turn off all the potential hazards in a room. Earthquakes don't kill many people in Japan; it's the fires that often follow when gas lines leak and electric appliances ignite the gas. Remember Fight Club? Same thing here, only on a larger scale (and less fighting).

Leaving the kitchen, we had to navigate a smoke-filled hallway by crouching down and feeling the walls. A surveillance video later revealed one member of our group decided to simply walk through with her hand over her mouth, causing us all to "fail" the exercise. Outside of the hallway was a entire street of semi-demolished houses. Clearly, the center was not just giving us a dry run-through on what to do in the event of an earthquake. Their goal was to make us believe that we had just been in an earthquake and we were now dealing with the consequences. Their dedication to this fantasy was impressive by Walt Disney World standards, but considering this was all in the name of public service, I was blown away.

There was so much to see and not nearly as much time as I would have liked to fully absorb all the information and scenery that I was being presented with. There was a fire extinguisher lesson that included a fantastic game element where we used a simulated device to spray water on a "fire." There was a room with a dummy underneath a fallen bookshelf that we needed to rescue by jacking the shelf up and pulling the dummy free. The dummy had no hair and a gray shirt, making it look just like Michael Scofield from Prison Break, and once "Michael" was out he was retracted under the shelf again at the push of a button so the next group could try.

But the best was saved for last when our group stepped onto a metal platform and braced ourselves for simulations of actual earthquakes from Japanese history. We first got a taste of the 2005 quake in Miyagi Prefecture and then we were given a theoretical quake that is supposed to hit the Kansai area in the next thirty years. They were about to open the gate and thank us for coming when I stopped them and made a request: could they please let us feel the Great Hanshin Earthquake from 1995? Having been to Kobe many times and seen the photos and memorials, I wanted to get some idea of what happened that day. They obliged and fired up the machine one last time. I was surprised by how short it was, a single but powerful jolt followed by a few seconds of nearly unnoticeable shaking.

As giddy as I was getting off the platform, I had a rather unpleasant realization. The fabulous "ride" I had just experienced was entirely based upon major catastrophes. Real, deadly earthquakes that leveled cities, shattered families and killed thousands. I saw the list of available quakes and it included the 1923 Tokyo quake, the same one that Akira Kurosawa wrote about in his biography. He spoke of corpses piled in the streets. What would he think of people riding that same shockwave and giggling? What if some "hurricane center" had a Katrina simulation that sent patrons laughing through a torrent of water breaking through a virtual levee? Would it still be tasteless if it was preceded by a few hours of instruction on how to survive a major storm?

It's possible that I'm thinking too much about all this. It's also possible that I'm simply a monster who shouldn't have been amused by all that shaking. After all, the parting message was ultimately one of community. For all the loss of life in Kobe fourteen years ago, that fire had to start somewhere and maybe, just maybe, someone could have been there to put it out and prevent it from engulfing entire neighborhoods. Regardless of my anxieties, the Abeno Life Safety Learning Center is both a hell of a lot of fun and thoroughly educational. I can't promise that I will remember every thing I'm supposed to turn off in the event of an earthquake, but I am damn sure I would try and grab an extinguisher if I ever saw a fire.

Labels: earthquake, Japan, JET, Osaka

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Well, last night was certainly an adventure. Probably the last such adventure...ever?

I went into Osaka last night to attend a birthday get-together for Alex. The plan was two-fold: we were going to meet in a bar in Shinsaibashi and then we were going back to his neighborhood karaoke joint where we would sing until morning. I went ahead and added a third-fold by coming in early and eating dinner. Rather than go for the usual bar food, I was hoping to track down a special van Mako and I saw on TV this week. Two college students take their mobile kitchen to different areas and serve "healthy burgers," in this case the main ingredient being not beef but fugu. Now that I've come to understand that fugu is delicious and it won't kill me, I'm now on board with eating it whenever possible. Unfortunately, since I was armed only with an address and not a map, finding the van proved impossible. I recovered and simply ate a surprisingly tasty calzone at the bar.

I hung out and waited for people to arrive, all the while slowly making my way through a series of cocktails. Eventually people turned up, but until Alex was there I had no idea who was there to meet up and who was just there for the hell of it. As it turns out, he knew nearly everyone in the place even though most of them weren't expecting him or anything. One guy in particular I recognized as a regular from my favorite spot, Captain Kangaroo in Umeda. It's funny, I knew his name from a conversation we had during my Kansai Gaidai days, but in all the times since then that I saw him in the bar, we never really spoke. Then last night we suddenly had occasion to sit there and talk about a dozen different things.

It was just past 10 o'clock that we left the bar and rode the subway to the karaoke place. Between waiting for more people and waiting for the discount night prices to begin, we didn't actually enter the karaoke room until 11. Once inside I was pretty impressed. Alex was expecting a fairly large group so we had a really spacious room, complete with a slot machine (not for profit, just for fun). We started singing with only three people but over time it swelled to about eleven, most of whom were Japanese and none of whom I had met before. I lost count but I don't think anyone sang more than me or Alex, at least not in the early hours.

As the night went on and I kept drinking, I gradually started to fade. It wasn't that I felt drunk, I simply felt tired. I rarely have cause to stay up past midnight these days, so being awake and trying to sing "Baby Got Back" at two-thirty in the morning proved to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, the room was so big I had enough room to stretch out and lay down across the seats. I don't when I went down for good, but I know we were in there until 5 AM.

Unfortunately, the long night of drink mixed with a smattering of snacks did not sit well in my stomach. For the first time in years I had to throw up. While that is never a good thing, I am happy that at this point in my life I can tell when it has to happen and just deal with it, which means it's over quickly and I feel better right away. It would have been nice if I had taken care of business before the karaoke counter turned off their drink machines, because when it was over I really, really wanted a glass of water.

Our group had shrunk to only five people at this point and we all wanted to sit down and get something in our stomachs. McDonald's proved to be the most popular choice, considering time and proximity to our location, so we went over there and ordered breakfast. I was still out of it, more or less, but being me I went ahead and ate a Mega Muffin. It didn't go down my throat easily but once it was in my gut I felt a lot better....rather, I felt as good as you can after eating McDonald's.

It was a pretty strange scene, honestly, reminding me of the old Larry Miller routine about the "five stages of drinking." Everyone seemed a bit tipsy and a couple of folks wanted things that weren't on the menu (such as gyoza) and they were reluctant to take "no" for an answer from the staff. Then one of these guys, a man about ten years older than me, said that holding the tray reminded him of the time he spent in prison as a child. I didn't ask why he went to prison, probably because he brought it up so casually I don't think it struck me as odd until after I left.

It was a fun night, and I'm glad I went, but throughout the ride home I thought about what I should have done differently. For starters, I should have stopped drinking booze before midnight, perhaps even earlier. I would have been just as eager to sing while drinking soda as I was drinking beer. Once you start second guessing yourself though, the big question comes up: should I have stayed up all night? Part of me says no, because the trade off is I spent a large portion of today making up for lost rest. But the part of me that enjoys, you know, fun things says yes because it's not like I would have gotten anything special done today anyway. I basically concentrated my weekend in a long Saturday night and had an abbreviated Sunday as a result. That's a fair trade in my book, especially when staying out means lots of singing while an ordinary Sunday does not.

However, I must be realistic. There was a time where staying up all night was basically normal, but at this point in my life I don't have the energy for it anymore. I was out all night but I wasn't up all night, yet I spent all of today feeling as if I had not slept. Add a forthcoming baby into the mix and that's a living, breathing, screaming reason for me to make sure and catch the last train.

But before the baby gets here...maybe I'm not done trying to push it to the limit.

Labels: Alex, but I love gatherings, friends, karaoke, Osaka

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