Archive for July, 2005
Location
Posted on July 23, 2005
Curious about where I live? Why, its right here! Note the bigness of THE BOULEVARD.
Yuuma
Posted on July 15, 2005
Just over 9 years of Japanese study has finally come in handy in the form of reverse engrish style Japanese typos. I was looking at Combo Clothing today and came across this shirt:
It says “gamer” then has some kanji under it. I can only assume they wanted to use the word senshu (選手) to mean gamer (it means player, like baseball player). But it looks like they must have typed in senshuu (先週) because that’s what’s on the shirt. That means last week. Maybe its social commentary on how using the word “gamer” is “so last week” but I think its just a typo. What a difference a “u” can make. This is the kind of rich, engaging humor studying Japanese can bring you after 8 or 9 years. Sign up today!
I’m The Train Man
Posted on July 8, 2005
Densha Otoko (電車男) is a new drama on Fuji TV that just started last night (Thursday night @ 10pm). It centers around a 22 year old otaku youth who saves a fashionable woman of his dreams on the train from a drunken man’s harassment on the train. Does this sound familiar? If you live in Japan you’ve heard this story several times. It started as a thread on 2-ch, was collected as a book, released as a movie and is now a TV drama. This is part of a slightly disturbing new trend of Japanese movies becoming dramas, but in this case I can forgive. The show is, like most things in Japan, brutally self-referential. I enjoy this for the same reason I enjoy the Made in Wario games; if people make enjoyable references to past enjoyable experiences, it makes me appreciate them even more. The opening theme song of Densha Otoko is Twilight by ELO. This is also the only fully animated portion of the show, depicting a bunny girl riding on giant snake-like trains flying in the sky and attacking a huge daikon shaped spaceship. It has nothing to do with the show (except for the trains), but it has everything to do with otaku. It’s an obvious reference to the old Gainax Daicon V opening animation, which had a bunny girl riding a flying guitar and a giant daikon shaped spaceship. Even some of the nonsensical reverse explosions are featured, with the same background song. To people who don’t know/care about anime (maybe the majority of people who will watch the show) this is just another “oh those wacky anime fans” moment. But to the actual otaku who are watching this show to see their lifestyle get a little taste of the limelight, this actually means something.
Now look at all the words I’ve written so far. The show hasn’t even started yet.
The first episode set up the basic story that we’re all familiar with by this point. A 22 year old guy who is a regular user of the discussion board “a-chan” has a fairly crappy life. He is an otaku. Anyone who lives in a country other than Japan and thinks “otaku” should be worn as some kind of badge of honor should watch the first 15 minutes of this show. Being an otaku in the country that spawned the term means you are despised. He bumps into a trendy looking woman, but when he tries to help her pick up her things (amongst his scattered anime goods, fresh from a trip to Akihabara) she recoils and snatches her stuff away from him. She is repulsed by his very existence, let alone the fact that he bumped into her and tried to TOUCH her STUFF. It should also be pointed out that they paint otaku as really crazy. Our hero is the ultimate nice guy, but his friend has a serious ankle fetish, something that gets revealed after they obsessively snap photos of a voice actress at an interview. They, like everyone in Akihabara, always wear backpacks. Even with their work suits. Things are a little exaggerated, but if I was going to make a show about eskimos I’d make them live in the dome shaped igloos I saw in cartoons when I was a kid too.
In any case our guy saves a girl from a drunk man, and gives his address to his dream girl, who wants to send him something to thank him. He’s basically floating home and gets on a-chan to tell everyone what happened. This is the best part of the show in my opinion. They show the people chatting on the board as they type their messages. The people are of all types, a super obsessed Hanshin Tigers fan, a goth computer programmer, a 9 year old girl, a wife with a fresh bruise on her cheek and a husband beating on the door. “Hurry up and fix my fucking dinner idiot! Do I have to hit you again?!” She cringes. I cringe. I’ve never seen anything like that on Japanese television. But who knows what’s going on on the other end of computers on these discussion boards? No one. Everyone is just called 無名しさん, basically “Mr. No-name”. If we just saw the messages pop up on our guy’s screen I think it would be overpoweringly boring, but seeing the faces that go with the messages makes this the most interesting show I’ve seen on Japanese TV thus far. And I’ve seen a fat man in a fundoshi jump over flaming hurdles.
I mentioned the characters are all exaggerated, but I believe the effect they were going for is achieved. You can’t help but feel for our Train Man, he helps out everyone he can, even down to helping neighborhood kids with their PSP game by reciting the game’s plot from memory after taking one look a the screen. He’s impossibly nice, but he gets shit on by everything from his boss to forces of nature. His 23rd birthday doesn’t quite go well, and after a comedically ridiculous run of bad luck we find him sitting alone on the roof of a building, with a single slice of cake he bought. He stuffs the cake into his face, then hoists himself up onto the metal fence around the roof, about half a foot from throwing himself over the edge. He falls back onto the roof crying about how badly things are going. The action before this was clearly done for laughs, but it kind of makes us think about how much these guys get crapped on, and what strain it probably puts on them. At least it makes me think that. When he gets home a package from his dream woman is waiting and he gets online to tell everyone. He has her phone number on the packing slip, but doesn’t have the confidence to call her. His online chat friends, nameless people scattered all over Japan urge him on to call her, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Then a ridiculously detailed ASCII picture comes across with a simple message. “Go for it Train Man!” He vows to change his ways and just go for it. The battered wife tells her husband to shove it. People jump around and clap even though they can only see words on a screen. He dials the phone. She reaches to pick it up. The episode ends.
The end theme is by Sambomaster, which of course rocks the face of all the other shows on Japanese TV. I have never really felt compelled to follow any drama, be it in English or Japanese up to this point, but if this show can keep up the energy of this first episode, it will be well worth my time. It’s an ungodly hour of the morning as I write this, I’m listening to Sambomaster‘s newest album and I’ve just written over 1,000 words about a show that will, in the grand scale of things, probably only amount to the TV flavor of the next 3 months. Still I say, with great hope for those 3 months:
がんばれ 電子男！！！
Eat to Live
Posted on July 5, 2005
America is another year older, and you know what that means! It’s time to eat till our stomachs explode! For the fifth year in a row Takeru Kobayashi has won the hotdog eating contest at Coney Island at according to the website “what is believed to be the 90th installment of the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest.” I just like that the contest is so awesome that they don’t even know how long they have been doing it. Local tinywoman Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas came in second, striking a blow for Asian American Professional Eaters around the world (AAPE for short). Here in Japan nothing happened for America Day, but I’m sure somewhere there is a cute character shooting flaming volleyballs while wearing a huge Star Spangled Uncle Sam hat and screaming the Gettysburg Address. Still, no matter how overpoweringly American it may be, it will never replace the battlin’ beetles in the hearts of Japanese youth.