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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

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”

Yatta, We have landed at Narita at 6???am on Sunday morning. It was very hot and humid. Too damn hot and humid. I quickly did the necessary stuff of passing thru customs and sending off a larger piece of luggage to Sukagawa before seeking sanctuary in the bus.<br />
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<img src="http://gallery.mergo.net/d/22384-1/IMG_2656.JPG" alt="" /><br />
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The busride to Shinjuku took around 90 minutes from Narita. Really interesting ride, you can see all the small kei cars driving on the highway. They are cars of and engine capactiy of 660cc or less and can be differentiated with their yellow number plates. Some of them are hilarious. No sense of aerodynamics. Just a matchbox on wheels.<br />
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We were the first ones in Shinjuku, reaching there just a bit before 10am. Check-in wasn't for a couple of hours so we decided to venture out in the heat and explore around. <br />
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Here's a pic of Joel (a JET in the same town as I'm in) and Damon.<br />
<img src="http://gallery.mergo.net/d/22390-1/IMG_2664.JPG" alt="" /><br />
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I was fortunate to meet up with Ewan, my predecessor in Tokyo for lunch. Great guy, it was a pity that he was heading home - could have had a lot of fun with him in Suk. To give you guys an impression on how bad the air quality was on that day, here's a pic of Tokyo from the Metropolitan Government office.<br />
<img src="http://gallery.mergo.net/d/22392-1/IMG_2669.JPG" alt="" /><br />
On a clear day, you should be able to see Mt. Fuji in the background but as you can probably tell, the air quality was just downright crap.<br />
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Finally the check-in time came and I quickly rushed up to have a quick shower and head for the holy land…<br />
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<br /><a href="http://hectic3.shanaproject.com/index.php?/archives/3-Im-in-Japan!-The-day-before-orientation..html#extended">Continue reading "I'm in Japan! The day before orientation."</a>

Hey everyone! I finally have a working internet connection, albeit an average one and some free time. Hence I’ll be reporting on my experience thus far.

Packing and Storing stuff
As I was going away for a year, I had to somewhat clean up my room. I guess it can be best told in pictures.

Before: What my room usually looks like

All the figure boxes stacked outside

Now, all the figure boxes tucked away in the storeroom

My room all nice and clean (and very bare)

My Little rant on packing
Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it deserves any mention, but I can assure you it was the most tedious, fustrating and most annoying thing I had to do. Considering what was needed and what wasn’t was incredibly hard. When shipping things, you had to weigh up the possibilities that you could buy it over at the place you are going to, how big (both in thems of physical size and weight - damn you volumemetric weight) and whether the stuff you are shipping would be adverse affected by less than optimal environmental conditions (shipping chocolate in a box to a place where it is in the middle of summer isn’t exactly the best of ideas).

I had ordered a 20kg boc from OCS *Overseas Courier Service) to ship over here, and it was a really small box. despite my best of efforts, I could only stuff in 18.5kg into that small box. Below is a picture of the box. I have added the churuyasan 2 doujin and a fate pencilboard for reference:

Check-in luggage as everyone well knows is 20kg, regardless of how many pieces you have. When you are moving to a country for a year, this limit becomes a nightmare. The problem is further worsened by the fact that you have to bring 2 pieces as you have to ship one off to the place you are staying at the airport and bring a smaller bag to the orientation. What most people don’t realise is how lucky the Americans have it when it comes to this. They are allowed 2 pieces of check in luggage (physical dimensions have a limit) and each piece has a 32kg limit. Yes, that’s right, Each piece has a 32kg limit!!!!

They really do have it easy, though I do smirk when I hear an American JET has to fly domestically to reach their prefecture where the standard 20kg limit applies.

I spent the last day making sure that the baggage wasn’t too much over this ‘limit’. As discovered in my previous travel to Japan late last year, you can kinda push the limit, but not too much - they really cannot be stuffed issuing paperwork for just a couple kilograms over. So more stress - taking things in and out, making sure it fit and again, making lots of hard decisions…. but it would all be futile….
Continue reading “Coming over to Japan”

Yes, thanks to Tyris this blog is up and running. I'll search for some visual styles and update this soon!