Hectic's Blog

Many apologies for the lack of updates, I have been bogged down with much work recently. For the past couple weeks, I have been busy helping out with the local Sukagawa Short Film festival.  I have been tasked with putting Japanese subtitles on 11 foreign films and to cut the long story short, they have taken a while. 

I shan’t bore you with details, but I have been looking forward to blogging again. I want this blog to serve 2 purposes, 1) To document interesting things that I have been doing in Japan and 2) to provide useful information to others who may be coming to Japan. I have read many blogs and many of them serve as a space for people about rant about what they hate. I prefer something constructive, and that is what I’ll strive to do.  If you have anything to add to any of the posts or correct any wrong information, please tell me!

I have only recently switched to wordpress from serendipity due to the large volume of spam comments I have been gettings. Even after the switch, I still get some spam comments. I do hope people with some experience in this field may enlighten me on how to get rid of this pestilence. Regardless, the theme is very stock-standard and I will try to improve it despite having no design experience.

I have one more film to go with the film festival and after that I should have a lot more free time, then again I am a 怠け者 (なまけもの) which means ‘lazy person’, then again, I think many people are.

If you are ever in Kyoto, and you really really have nothing better to do (which I doubt as there are just so many things to do in Kyoto), you can stop by and take a look at one of the most revered studios around - Kyoto Animation. Its actually very easy to get to, especially when you are heading to Uji to take a look at the Byodo-in temple.

Kyoto Animation is actually made up of many different offices and studios located all around Kyoto. I decided to just visit the main one as it was the easiest one to get to.

To get to the main office, you have to catch a local line train on the JR Nara line from the Kyoto JR station. This means you cannot catch the special limited express train, which only has around 5 stops until it gets to Nara, meaning it skips many stations, and unfortunately, if you want to go to Kyoto Animation, you cannot take this. However, if you want to check out Byodo-in, you can take this special limited express train. I will talk about that in a later post.

Once you ride the train for around 20 minutes or so, get off at Kohata station. Yes, Kohata. I actually had a few laughs seeing this name, more than a coincidence perhaps?

Now, unlike the episode in Lucky Star, Kyoto Animation is just next to the JR Kohata station. I suspect the characters took the Keihan line, which runs pretty closely to the JR line, but you would have to walk a fair distance. Anyway, once you get out of the Kohata station, turn to your left and you should see this:

Notice that there are some people outside of the building. Apparantly there were 3 people with ’sugoi’ SLR cameras taking pictures of that yellow building. It’s good to know that I’m not the only crazy person who would make this pilgrimage.
Now, walk towards the yellow building. Congratulations, you are now at the main office of Kyoto Animation!

Here’s a couple of screen shots from Lucky Star for comparison.

This place, despite being next to a train station is very quiet. When I went there, there were hardly any people, cars or buses. So I guess what Konata said was true - that they like being located in quiet places so they can concentrate and produce awesome stuff that they do!

Travel Details - How to get there
Line: JR Nara line
Service: Local Service only
Station: Kohata （木幡）
Cost: 230 yen
Time: Around 20 minutes

>>This is an entry in progress - Last update 2008/4/7<<

During my time on JET, I have travelled around Japan a bit, and whenever I go to some new place, I will checkout whatever Anime stores they have there. Now obviously I do not travel to places just for their Anime stores (with Akihabara being the big exception) but it is nice to have a change after sightseeing all day long. Trust me, there is only so much temple viewing you can do in a day.

I hope to Update this entry as much as possible and do note, this list is by no mean exhaustive. I am sure I am missing out on a lot of stores, but for the ones I have visited, I can give my personal opinion on what they are like. I will break the stores down by location instead of the store type as I reckon that would be easier for people who are going to certain places to find out what stores available

Sapporo

Animate - A pretty standard Animate, and relatively large too.

Gamers - Occupies only the first floor of the building, which has a big Gamers sign out in front. Smaller than the Animate in Sapporo and pretty standard in every other aspect.

Toranoana - Located right next to Animate in its own separate building. it occupies the first floor of the building with an extensive doujin collection at the back

Lashinbang - This store is perhaps one of the biggest in Japan. It is definitely bigger than the ones in Ikebukuro and Kobe.  It is broken into 3 different parts, one focusing on cosplay items, another focusing on video games and the last one focusing on comics, doujin and figures. I did manage to find one of the elusive Limited Edition Azusa from Idolm@ster at this store and I highly recommend it for its selection of doujin goods and other Anime merchandise. I picked up a Prism Ark bedsheet for around 4000 yen at this store which is a considered a bargain for usual Dakimakura.

Melonbooks - The northern most outpost of this Doujin establishment. It is located in the basement of the building that Animate is located in.

Liveret.

Mandarake - This mandarake outlet is located on the 5th floor of a department store. It feels quite odd when you head up the esculators as you see floor after floor of fashion stores, only to meet a doujin mecca when you hit the 5th floor. Like any other Mandarake, it has -a lot- of doujin which are stacked neatly in shelves. It could be a bit hard to browse, but It is one of the biggest doujin stores you can find. Also available are cheap(er) second hand figures which are piled onto shelves at the back. You can spend a bit of time here looking for bargains,  but do be careful, some may have defects as they are after all, second hand.

Sendai - Animate, Toranoana, Melonbooks

Fukushima-shi

Animate - By far the smallest Animate I have been to, doesn’t have that great variety of goods, probably because its located on a small corner on the 3rd floor of the shopping complex that makes up the station.

Koriyama

Animate - Oh the amount of money I have spent here….. Since Koriyama is the biggest town next to where I am located, I head to this Animate quite often whenever I need a dose of moe. It is a pretty average Animate outlet, on the 3rd floor of the ATi (pronouced Ah-tee). When you are walking towards the store, you will pass by a few fashion stores, even a lingerie store. Quite a few people come here but there is always enough room to move around or to browse whatever you are interested in. Definitely one of my favourite outlets.

Tokyo - Akihabara 

Undoubtedly the center of the Anime world. Many things spawned from this place and it has the most anime stores in Japan.

Tokyo - Ikebukuro

Animate

Lashinbang

K books

Tokyo - Nakano Broadway

Mandarake

Osaka - Den den town

Located in Nipponbashi, this is Japan’s Western Holy Land. Stores are generally located along a long main road with both sides featuring covered pavements meaning you can still shop without getting (too) wet!

Animate

Sofmap

Volks - I am particularly fond of this outlet of Volks. It is much bigger than its Akiba counterpart featuring 5 floors, with the top floor dedicated to Dollfies. It also has many cabinets which people can rent out and sell things they no longer want. This Volks outlet -always- has cheap figures, usually ones that they want to get rid of (meaning not so popular). However, the discounts on these brand new goods are staggering, ranging from 20-80% off.  Everytime I walk into this store, I always come out with big bags of loot.

Kyoto

Gamers, Melon books, Animate

Kobe - melon books, Yellow submarine, Toranoana, Animate (all conveniently located in the shopping complex just across from Kobe station)

Himeji - Animate (Occupies two stories in a building near the station. One of the larger animates I have seen outside of Tokyo)

Nara

Animate

As you can probably tell, I have been to many Animates around Japan. I will keep on adding and improving this post whenever I can.

Well after much deliberation, I decided to get a laptop. I will use this mainly at work as it will give me something to do while I am not studying Japanese or planning lessons.

Sorry about the shit photo, it came from my keitai….

Here are the specs:

IBM Lenovo (yuck) Thinkpad T61

T7300 processor (2ghz, 4mb L2 cache)

2gb ram

160gb 5400rpm hdd

15.4″ screen (1680×1050)

Dvd burner

Fingerprint reader

I got this laptop from Sphericus who had a nice deal on some laptops. My only beef about it is that it doesn’t have a camera, and more importantly, it has no TV-out which is quite surprising. Apart from that, it works fine, even with the vista that came preloaded with it. I have also been stress testing the maching by running BOINCwhich is a client for distributed computing. If you have some spare CPU cycles, why not donate them for a worthy cause. I’m just running it to see how the computer can handle 100% cpu usage for hours at a time

Hey everyone, It has been a long time since i have posted on this blog. Now that I have a laptop at work, I will be posting a lot more, so watch this space. I have the first post in the works, and I hope to finish it soon

Hey everyone. Sorry about the lack of updates - I've been really slack and all that. But rest assured, I will have many posts up soon - I hope.<br />
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I really do not have a natural nack for blogging due to my really lazy nature. I like procrastinating, don't you. Anyway, enough excuses - I better start writing something!

Sorry about the delay in getting these up, I’ve been pretty slack. Yes, I made the trek back to Tokyo for the Summer Wonder Festival on the 12th of August. It’s a big figure and garage kit event at the Tokyo Big Sight (same venue as Comiket) but it only uses up East Halls 2-6. Warning, this thread uses a lot of pics - thanks again to Sphere for hosting my photos, I think I’d use up my flickr bandwidth pretty quickly if he didn’t help out.

Without much further ado, let’s begin. As with the tradition of any large scale event at Tokyo Big Sight, one has to start queuing up early - like real early. The mad rush to get goods the moment you step foot inside the venue so it is of crucial importance that you get there early. As I did for Comiket 71 last year, and would do for Comiket 73 the week after, I stayed at the K’s hostel in Asakusa Tokyo. The first train from the nearest station is the 5:04am train bound for Ryogoku. I have to catch this train and transfer at Tsukishima to the Yurakucho line and then head towards Toyosu. From there I take the Yurikamome monorail to either Ariake (for east entrance line up) or Tenmon-somethingorother…. for the west entrance line up. If you are utterly confused, please take a look at this map.

I get to Tokyo Big Sight at around 5:50am and this is where I was in the queue:

As there is no daylight savings in Japan, in the Summer, the mornings are unusually bright.

To give you an idea how long the queue was here’s a pic of the line behind me:

Which goes on further

And to infinity and beyond…?

You seriously have not been in a queue until you go to one of these events. The queue for wonderfest was a long narrow line. For comiket, due to the large numbers, they actually break the queue up in sections and then reform the line just before opening. Times like this I really think that the Japanese wrote the book on crowd control.

At around 9am we finally started moving. The movement was slow and it was very hot. I think it was hovering around 33 or something, and worse in direct sunlight.

Hooray, Tokyo Big sight in sight!

Continue reading “Summer Wonderfest 2007″

I didn’t really notice it during my trip to Akihabara before orientation, but there actually has been quite a few changes.

First of all, if you come out of the JR Akihabara Electric town exit and turn left, you will see the court that has the Kotobukiya and K-Books store on your left and Gamers on your right (think of that Akiba shot in Lucky Star 16).

Go along that court and approach Chuo-dori (the main street of Akihabara). On that particular corner, a building that was once there is now gone. I think it used to sell duty free stuff.

Walking along Chuo-dori, I noticed that there is a new outlet of Azo Bit City, a store with heaps of figures games etc. It’s located at one of the back streets of Akiba.

I reckon this outlet exists as the main on Chuo-dori no longer exists. It’s now one big construction zone that rivals the size of the construction pit that is next to Yamigawa soft.

Wonder what they are building there…

Here’s some other pics of the Holy Land…

First up, a shot of Animate, Toranoana, a big Taito arcade and a Yamigawa Soft outlet.

A shot of one of the side streets of Akiba. PC Stores and Maid cafes populate this area. Think this is the same street where that new Azo Bit outlet is on

Lastly another side street.

I’ll try and do a more comprehensive tour of Akiba next time.

After a 3 hour bus ride, we finally make it to Koriyama where we had a formal event where we met our contracting organisations for the first time. On the way back, I noticed this shop along Route 4

I have noticed that most of the roads here don’t have names. Instead they rely heavily on route numbers. For instance, the road I’m staying on is Route 118. Now I kinda understand why they used route numbers in Pokemon… It wasn’t to confuse the hell out of us when playing the game - they actually use it in real life to confuse the hell out of us in real life. You get used to it though…. well kinda.

Here’s a few pics of my Apartment. Its a self-contained apartment with one living room, a small loft where I sleep in and the kitchen/bathroom/toilet. I’ll put up a post on my apartment when it is in a more presentable state, but here’s a few quick shots I took.

Since I live on the second floor, I need to take this flight of stairs up every time I come in.

Kitchen, bathroom and toilet in the background.

Living Room

My Balcony

I promise to put more up later.
Continue reading “My Apartment and Koriyama Bon Odori”

During the Orientation, we were put up in the Keio Plaza Hotel which is a very nice hotel. Seemed quite upclass but I was told that it was not a 5 star hotel - which I found incredibly hard to be believe.
It was full of official events with speeches and training sessions.

Some of the speeches were quite interesting in fact, with some of the speakers making heaps of jokes. They probably understand that we were all very tired and out attention span was quite short. In the evening they gave us a really nice buffet dinner. It must have cost them quite a bit as it was really good stuff.

These people seemed to be quite important…. I don’t know who they are as I arrived late.

After that was all done and over with, we had our Prefectural Night out organised by the Fukushima JET association. Similar groups in other prefectures were doing similar things at the same time. Since everyone were to meet in the lobby, groups of people were holding out sheets of paper with their prefecture’s name on it and waving it around. It seems that the chaps at FuJET seemed like they knew what they were doing as shown below

We all went to an izakaya (bar) which had a 2 hour nomihoudai (all you can drink) session for just 2500 yen. It was a really busy place, filled with very noisy locals some of which decided to join us.

We all had a really fun time, it was a great opportunity to get to know the other JETs who were placed close to me. Though, it was kinda hard talking to them as it was so very loud. Yes, those locals who are generally reserved just let loose at the izakaya. You see them skulling bottles of beer, screaming and just barfing up (obviously from too much drinking). Speaking of which, the toilet had a bowl which people could throw up in…. and for the sake of brevity, I’ll just supply the link to it here .

After 2 hours of drinking we felt that it was not enough, so we went back to shinjuku and went to a karaoke parlour. You can really see at the skills of some people come out at karaoke, for instance this guy here knew quite a few Japanese songs.

LoL at red eyed Moody in the background. He’s the FuJET president and he’s from Wonga Park which is out past Ringwood. He’s quite the character and a top bloke to talk to. It’s amusing when us Aussie JETs just huddle together throwing slang at each other to the puzzled faces of the American on lookers. At first he was in full on caretaker mode…. but he soon let loose. God know what he wanted to do here:

Continue reading “JET Orientation”