IKEA decks out the Portliner running to Port Island in Kobe so it looks like you’ve just walked into a university student’s first apartment. So hot.

(More photos here: 1, 2, 3, 4 via PinkT)

Posted in Japan on Wednesday April 9, 2008. Shoutouts.

Shuetsu Sato is a Japan Railways employee known for making complex, stylish signs and maps from strips of coloured duct tape. The majority of his work could be spotted around Shinjuku station over the past couple of years, but similar beautifully ad-hoc construction signs can been seen at almost all those (seemingly) perpetually under-construction stations around Japan.

Posted in Design on Thursday September 13, 2007. Shoutouts.

It’s time to launch my latest blogging endeavour. Budget East is a guide to budget travel in Japan, Korea and (eventually) the rest of Asia. There’s already information on skiing at Niseko, Hokkaido and some great guides to snow in Japan for the upcoming snow season. Keep an eye on it for travel tips, quirky news and a bunch of information for all those traveling around Asia on a budget. The address: http://budgeteast.com/

Posted in Linkage on Wednesday December 13, 2006. Shoutouts.

Why you should always practice your elocution. Why you should never be surprised at Japanese television. How much would I have loved to implement this as a challenge-time round for some of my less studious students a year or so back? Muchly much.

New York’s unique.

Posted in Vidiot on Saturday November 4, 2006. Shoutouts.

It took us a long time to drive there. The map written in tiny kanji characters that left me in the front squinting and tracing words with my finger, soundlessly trying pronunciation options until one clicked. The stereo was bassy, kick drum to the chest and the water rippling in time to the beat. “Left into, I think it’s ‘Asahi ga oka’ but I’m not sure. It should be just up here.” It felt good to be on the road again. Good to be back in a car. I hadn’t driven since the sweaty horror of rush hour in Kuala Lumpur. Hadn’t wanted to even have to deal with cars since then. So it was nice, then, to just slump back in the passenger seat and do battle with the map. By the time we edged off the highway, and struck into suburbia, it was already dusk. Our target visible a long time before we reached it, edging in concentric circles closer and closer, until we found a nearby shopping centre, and set out on foot.

The first fence wasn’t big, and we easily clambered over it, then ducked through a service gate to avoid the second. It was totally dark now, and remarkably quiet for the suburbs. The huge complex backs onto a golf course on one side, and a hospital on the other, perhaps explaining the stillness. You knew you were still near Osaka though, that much was clear from the light-pollution reflecting off the low-hanging clouds and lending a flat grittiness to everything. Film Noir with neither the sirens or the coats. I wondered what I’d say to Security if they jumped us, and decided I’d leave the talking to her. Sure of her ability to make friends with anyone within the first minute of talking to them. Sure of her easy confidence.

The single lane road curved down and to the right, and as we neared the bottom of the hill, opened onto a huge plaza, the tower looming at the far side. Words do a poor job of describing the drunken, other-worldly majesty of the tower. It stretches up towards the sky, bulbous protrusions and huge gaps in its superstructure ensuring that its profile is visually alarming. It cannot be considered symmetrical in any sense of the word, but rather looks as if it were shaped by the hands of some giant gleeful toddler; adding clay as necessary to make certain his lumpy masterpiece stayed balanced. It is hard to take in at a glance, as something that huge and disarming and magical surely belongs on the set of a science fiction movie, or in the pages of a children’s picture book, and not hidden in the back suburbs of Osaka.

As we climbed the stairs of the central plaza, and approached the base of the tower, there was an audible “thunk” and then again three times in quick succession, “thunk-thunk-thunk.” I whirled around, thinking we’d set off some kind of alarm. That we’d have to run and hide in the park. Breaking and entering. Extradition. Nothing. Just the distant buzz of traffic. I turned back to the tower. Ten red lights now ran up its sides, pulsing slowly in the darkness.

We walked a slow revolution around the tower, taking our time, and I was acutely conscious of how bizarre this was. We sprawled backwards onto the stairs and lay, staring up at it. Almost too surreal to believe. Never before in my life have I felt so utterly disconnected from reality. I was lying at the foot of some vision of a utopian future, thousands and thousand of kilometres from friends and family in Australia, hundreds from those in Japan and no-one knew where I was. No-one except for S, equally quiet in the darkness next to me.

We must have lain there, in the darkness, for hours. It felt like that. Passage of time measured by the slow blinking of the red lights atop the tower.

On the way home we bought eggs, and capsicum, and thick, fatty bacon and plotted making a Spanish Omelette and drinking cheap red wine and maybe getting the heater out, because Autumn had finally set in. Because that would be normal, and we both felt like we needed normal. It’s hard to believe that was all two years ago.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday October 15, 2006. Shoutouts [1].

How to improve your Japanese outside of Japan

I thought I’d write about this because I’ve just moved away from Japan and I’ve been looking at ways at making sure I don’t lose everything that I’ve picked up during my three years there.

While in Japan I perfected learning method as close to osmosis as possible. That is, immerse yourself in a Japanese-rich environment and hope to hell that you learn before you starve, because you can’t read anything. The main reason for this was, of course, laziness: I don’t enjoy spending huge chunks of my day flipping through dull as ditch-water textbooks, and I don’t think I ever will. However, the other reason was that I found that by involving myself in Japanese in this way I was able to improve my language skills while still enjoying the learning process and this was really important to me.

So, here are some resources that I’ve found useful for maintaining my level of Japanese whist outside of the country. I hope some of you will find them useful.

1. Skype (http://www.skype.com)

   You can listen to examples, read textbooks and flick through flash cards all you want but nothing is going to focus your abilities as much as a real conversation with a real live Japanese speaker. Skype is a godsend in this regard because it’s easy to use and install, is cross platform, and doesn’t cost you a cent.

   If you have friends in Japan then hector them to install Skype so you can chat. If you’re both running on a decent connection you can also enable webcams and finally live the video conferencing dream. Hello information superhighway.

   If you don’t know anyone in Japan with Skype, don’t worry, Skype has a huge directory of users who at any one time will be willing to chat it up in Japanese.

   Just click on “Search for Skype Users” then select Japan in the Country/Region pull down and finally tick the box labeled “Search for people who are in ‘Skype Me’ mode.” Bing, you suddenly have a list of hundreds and hundreds of Japanese speakers that are keen to learn to English, chat in Japanese and generally participate in Language exchange. Even better, you can do this at any time of the day, at your convenience, and it won’t cost you a cent.

   
   

2. Mixi (http://mixi.jp)

   This is the Japanese version of Friendster and Myspace and it is huge. It’s also managed to slip by pretty much under the radar outside of Japan. So, why is it a good resource for learning Japanese?

   For one, all of your Japanese friends living in Japan, and even those overseas probably already have an account and are already linked in with all the relevant Japanese social groups in their areas. Make friends with someone in your town via Mixi and suddenly a whole world of Japanese flash-mobs will be revealed to you.

   Secondly, you can write blogs and recommendations and they automatically show up in a list on any of your Mixi friends’ homepages and, likewise, theirs show up on yours. This is a huge incentive to read Japanese because you’re reading about day-to-day stuff that your friends did, with people you probably know.

   Then, if you’re really keen you can start blogging in reviewing stuff in Japanese, but that’s a little proactive for me, I just like reading about what other people have done. If you’re not in on Mixi, send me a mail and I’ll pass you an invite.

   

3. Podcasts

   They’re automatically updated, they slip into iTunes, and they jump straight onto your iPod when you’re not looking. They’re the best way you can keep a fresh, interesting, current selection of listening material close at hand. Here’s three that I dig:

   • Nihongo Juku has full Japanese text on the site, so after you’ve listened to it a couple of times you can grab out the dictionary and read through and double-check the meanings of words you missed. Superb resource.
   • Osaka dialect 大阪弁 Japanese lesson in English is a bit of a mouthful but Mayumi’s podcasts are great. Everything is in Japanese and English and she tells some great stories. Probably my most listened to podcast.
   • Japanese Pod 101 is a pretty professional outfit with a mix of video and audio stuff. They’ve got some good basic stuff and a lot of pretty amusing rambling. Check their latest date video, it’s great.

   

4. TV & Video

   Check your local listings for Japanese language news. It’ll often come on sometime after your local bulletin which is great because you already know roughly what they’re going to talk about. If you have time to watch both programs, then sit down and really focus for the duration.

   In Japan, when you’re overrun with terrible game shows, mediocre hosts and the endless, endless shit they make you suffer through (finding the great stuff amongst the hours and hours of wankery is a mission we’ll leave for the TV in Japan blog) it’s easy to get overwhelmed and give up on TV altogether. However, when it’s just 20 minutes a day in isolation, it’s surprising how easy it is to really focus and walk away feeling you’ve actually learnt something.

   In Australia, if you’ve got a set-top box, SBS shows the NHK news three times a day starting in the morning from 5:25 – 6:00, at midday: 12:30 – 13:30 and at night: 22:15-22:45. There’s no excuse to miss it. Check the SBS digital schedule for more information.

   Then there’s videos. How frustrating was it being in Japan and looking at the rows and rows and rows of awesome movies that you couldn’t watch because they didn’t have any English subtitles. Now you’re back on home soil, it’s payback time. Head to any cult or specialist video store and you’ll be staggered at how many Japanese movies they stock these days, all with English subtitles. If you’re feeling more adventurous, find your local Asian restaurant area and go hunting for back-alley video-stores which ususally offer an insane selection of pirated Asian TV series on VCD and DVD, often with English subtitles as well. If you’re stuck, find a University in your area, call the student guild and ask if they have a Manga/Anime club, then get the number of the president. If anyone in your town knows where to find Japanese material, it’s these guys and nine times out of ten they’ll be more than happy to help.

5. Nintendo DS

   I’m planning to write a full length article about using the DS as a learning resource a little later, but here’s the Cliff notes version. These little bastards are 100% region free. This means you can get your friends in Japan to post you all those crazy role-playing, kanji-practice and brain training games that are so much fun you don’t even realise you’re studying. While I’m bitterly disappointed that the DS doesn’t have Wipeout Pure, I’ll grudgingly accept that if you don’t have DS, you’re missing out.

So there we have it, five way you can improve your Japanese even when you’re not in the country. If you’ve any more hot tips, leave them in the comments and if you found this article useful, then please digg it so more people can share the love.

Posted in Japan on Monday October 2, 2006. Shoutouts [4].

Posted in Vidiot on Friday September 22, 2006. Shoutouts [1].

たっぶり 鱈子 means funny red hats are back and that, my pining to wear a huge red blobbin on your noggin friends, is good news for everyone.

Posted in Japan on Monday September 11, 2006. Shoutouts [3].

About Awamori:

Awamori is an alcoholic beverage indigenous to and unique to Okinawa, Japan. It is distilled from rice, not brewed.

Awamori is typically 60 proof, although “export” brands (including brands shipped to mainland Japan) are increasingly 50 proof. As awamori ages, its alcohol content rises, and some brands of awamori are 120 proof and will catch fire.

The most popular way to drink awamori is with water and ice. When served in a restaurant in Okinawa, it will nearly always be accompanied by a container of ice and carafe of water. Awamori can also be drunk straight, on the rocks, and in cocktails.

One thing they don’t mention in the writeup is just how jaw-blowingly cheap this stuff is. We’re talking getting four people absolutely plastered: genuine talking to walls and deciding you’re fluent in both Japanese and Okinawa-ben fucked, for about ten bucks, in a restaurant. Awesome.

They also don’t mention the hangover. This is probably a good thing.

Posted in Japan on Monday September 11, 2006. Shoutouts.

Pop quiz: what do you do when you’re stuck on a slow moving boat for two days with a bunch of Japanese university students, travelling businessmen and a few Europeans. The answer, the only answer, is that you get stonkingly, terrifically, terrifyingly drunk for the entire duration. Just like everyone else on the boat.

The students taught us a bewildering variety of increasingly complex Japanese drinking games that seemed, curiously, to all follow a pattern set by Lorna several years ago: “Dan drinks every minute, on the minute, until he passes out.” Despite this, I soldiered on, and did my best to learn all the rules so as to be able to relate them at future get togethers.

Then a couple of business men carrying millions of dollars worth of transistors to Taiwan busted out the Underworld and a huge, huge bottle of Awamori and it all got a bit messy. To those living in Japan that have a chance to take a ferry from somewhere to somewhere else, do it, it kicks the living crap out of aeroplanes, especially if you’re not in a huge rush.

After all, there aren’t vending machines full of beer on domestic flights.

Posted in Japan on Sunday September 3, 2006. Shoutouts.