Alright so I promised you my ‘hilarious Japanese kid comments’ but I’m still in the process of collecting them (I had a great one today!) so that post won’t come for a little while.

However I do have a great collection of hilarious example sentences taken from the iPod/iPhone app Japanese (by codefromtokyo) so I made a Youtube video listing my top 10 favourite strange sentences. So click the image below to watch! I won’t even charge you!

Well I hope you enjoyed it. As mentioned, more updates on the way! Until then, happy March, everyone!

The alternative title for this update is ‘Mike’s inner geek runs wild!’ Don’t worry, I won’t put a single spoiler on this update so please feel free to read it even if you’re saving the story for yourself. I know you want the pretty pictures so here they are!

I also put huge versions of these photos here on Flickr if you really want to get a good look at it.

OK, here come my thoughts on the game. I’ve played it for about two hours so far, so these are very preliminary ideas, but they might help you decide if you want to import it or wait for the translation. (Which I think is coming in around March).

• The game, even on the old TV I’m running it on, looks unbelievable. My friend is playing it on his HDTV and the level of detail you can see in things that are miles away from any action is crazy. If you blew a load of cash on a fancy TV you will get your money’s worth here. However, speaking of TVs:
• The Japanese writing used in the tutorial sections of the game (white on blue) are illegible on old TVs. At least in my experience – apparently everyone in Japan has a super TV so people like me stuck in the past get lumped with a series of white blurry boxes to read. I would imagine in the next few days a guide on what is going on will appear, and subtitles in the actual game are fine, but this game is complicated and it’s making it hard for me to play. If you can, I would advise hooking it up to a PC/laptop monitor as they are usually better than old TVs.
• The soundtrack is jaw dropping. It’s a shame it didn’t come with the lightning edition, more than once I’ve found myself pausing the game and just listening.
• The Japanese in the game is pretty tough. This game was aimed at teenagers plus, so it’s all pretty deep. Lots of odd words and colloquial stuff. Very useful for language learners, but I’d steer clear if you’re a beginner. The tutorials in particular are just huge paragraphs of complicated terminology.
• But despite all this, I’m having a hell of a lot of fun. I’m actually going to try to restrain myself over the next few days until I can borrow a friend’s monitor to play it on, but it’s going to be tough. It’s just such a pleasure to play.

I hope I haven’t sent too many die hard fans into a white hot rage! Thanks for reading!

Ok, the title of this post sounds like some dodgy festive hazing ritual, but what I meant really was ‘How am I replacing English with Japanese in my every day life?’ It sounds odd, saying I need to do that process when I’m in the country, but regardless of what people say;

• You can’t pick up a good level of Japanese just by ‘being around’ the language. You have to interact with it.
• It’s possible, in Tokyo, to get away with using basically no Japanese at all.
• You learn more if whatever you’re doing is fun. (This is also my ‘I ain’t readin’ no stinkin’ textbook!’ clause)

I honestly believe all of these things to be true, so as a result I have to fight my urge to buy awesome looking books in English, and stick to Japanese ones. So today’s update is ‘what I’m reading / watching / playing’ in Japanese. So let’s get started!

Battle Royale, Japanese Novel

Oh yes. I’ve read Battle Royale in English and watched the film. It’s safe to say it’s one of my favourite stories of all time. Yes there’s plenty of violence in every version, but there’s also love stories, some really memorable characters and backstabbing aplenty (in some cases, literally!). But today’s not the time to rant about how great it is. I’ve not read too much of the book, but my first thoughts are;

• Japanese names are horrible. There are 42 students, all with different names and thus different Kanji, to remember. I keep forgetting who is who and later on I’m wondering how someone who already got killed is now running away. Unless I accidentally bought ‘Zombie Royale’. Actually, that’s an awesome idea for a book, nobody steal it OK.
• The Japanese version of the book is ‘punchier’ than the translation. It’s told from the perspective of one of the students, and in the Japanese version he comes across as more opinionated. More realistic, I suppose. The English translation is good though, I’m not having a go at it!

It’s a great book though, although I already know what’s going to happen. My Japanese is at the point I can usually go a few sentences understanding everything, and most of the things I don’t know take not much time to ‘get’. (Usually symbols I’ve not come across before).

Liar Game Season 2, Japanese TV Drama

My TV quota is being filled nicely by the second season of Liar Game, a Japanese TV drama which averages 281 twists per episode and 194 cases of overreacting to frankly unsuprising revalations per episode minute. I reviewed the first season here. It’s helpfully boosting my strategic war game vocabularly to heights unknown!

Gyakuten Kenji / Ace Attorney Investigations, A Logic Puzzle Solving Game

Phoenix Wright, for those that don’t know, is a DS game where you solve crimes. I’m playing the new one, in which you play a prosecutor busting criminals left right and center. It’s hard, because they really love throwing legal vocab all over the shop, but it’s fun. After you get accused of murder for the 20th time, the word ’situational evidence’ really starts to stick in your head!

Finally, something I’m buying on Thursday. If you are one of my parents please look away now.

Final Fantasy XIII, A Role Playing Game

Oh YES. It’s nearly here. 100+ hours of beautiful, fully voice acted awesomeness. There’s going to be complex words, fast moving Kanji characters and explosions all over the place. It’s like if Michael Bay got into a fight at the Scrabble world championships. Using grenades. I’m not going to write about it until I get some way into it, but needless to say I’m pretty excited. It’s not really that expensive, which is a bit of a suprise, and the console means I can finally start catching up on my Japanese films too. I got a membership to rent DVDs from a place called Tsutaya but my laptop goes mental at the very idea of a DVD being produced outside of England, so this will finally let me watch some mental films.

Alright so this concludes my ‘write loads to make up for not writing for weeks then hope the feeling of guilt goes away’ project that didn’t work. (I still feel guilty!) I’ll try to do at least one update a week, probably on Sundays, from now on. I’d like to do one per exciting thing I do though, so it should (hopefully!) be more frequent than that. This update was really wordy though, I’ll try to cut down next time. Later!

This weekend went from being a recuperation weekend from the midterm exams (which I got a B in, by some lucky fluke!) to a very impromptu but really interesting few days. The whole time I’ve really been reminded of my gap year quite a few times, and that warm feeling of nostalgia was really welcome. It sure beats the bitter, bitter cold of winter in Tokyo, anyway.

On Saturday I was invited along to the Hosei University Symphony Orchestra performance. My friend Haruka, who was an exchange student at Sheffield university back in 2007 generously gave me two tickets so I went along with a friend from Sophia university. I can’t say I know a huge amount about orchestral music, but the quality was fantastic. I was amazed, really. The hall was huge, the orchestra was top quality. Sadly I couldn’t take any photos, so you will have to trust me that I went. I don’t think it was a drunken dream, anyway.

On Sunday I had originally planned to go to Kamakura (my first visit was way back in December 2006) with the volunteers but it was too cold and too late in the day by the time we got our lazy selves out of bed, so we opted to visit Meiji Shrine and then wander around Tokyo a bit. Here’s a few of my favourite photos (the rest are all here on Flickr)

This photo was taken under the canopy of the trees inside the shrine courtyard. It’s a pretty big tree, and gives you a great vantage of the whole place. Also, if you look carefully you can see a procession with a red umbrella, way off in the right of the shot. Well, that’s a traditional Japanese wedding! I felt it was a bit rude to take photos, but since everyone including the Japanese were, I figured I might as well.

The bride is wearing the white circle thing on her head. (Wow, traditional Japanese vocabulary fail!) The two girls in front of her are I think bridesmaids, someone might have to correct me on that. They made their way across the courtyard and back. It was a bit strange as none of them looked around at the people photographing them, I assume looking forward is part of the ceremony. (I guess ignoring all the cameras is probably easier, too).

Finally, these are 絵馬 (ema, or votive tablets) on which you write your hopes, dreams and wishes and leave them under the tree in the shrine, and they come true! A pretty great deal I think!

It really was kind of refreshing to do this sort of thing again. I think I’ve been so caught up with learning and university recently, I couldn’t just cut loose, grab my camera and some friends and take things at my own pace. So thanks to Ralph and Andy (the current vols) for putting up with this old man’s trip down memory lane!

As I mentioned previously the photos from today are on Flickr.

I got a message the other day from my friend and ex-Sheffield senior Joseph Tame asking me if I’d be interested in going to watch one day’s worth of the sumo tournament, which is held in the Kokugikan, an indoor arena in the Ryogoku area of Tokyo. As I’d never, in my 15 months worth of time in Japan, been to see the sumo I jumped at the chance, especially as it was really cheap. When we got there we realized the reason the price was so relatively low was because we were sitting so far back we might as well have watched from the train, but it was great nonetheless.

Now I don’t really know how sumo works. I mean, the first person to touch the ground with anything but their feet or be shoved out of the ring loses, that much I can follow. But each bout involves both wrestlers sizing each other up and getting into the fighting position at least twice, then leaving the ring and re-entering. I’m sure this has some highly significant traditional reason, but from what I could see it was all about winding up the crowd. It really worked – even way back at the top of the arena people were cheering and yelling, and I have to admit more than once I got caught up in the excitement and cheered my favourite. My favourite being whichever sumo wrestler had the coolest mawashi on.

So here are my photos! Please click one and then use the left and right arrows on each photo to view them all. I took some video, but we were so far away it’s really blurry and not worth posting. My apologies.

Now I have to admit, a lot of the time I was watching I didn’t understand what was going on. As it may have become clear, I didn’t know who any of the wrestlers were (aside from Asashoryu, who’s amazing career is really worth reading about) and we were a long way from the action. But still I found myself really drawn in and loving every moment of this amazing spectacle of human strength and speed. I’d go again at the drop of a hat, and who knows, maybe next time I’ll fork out for better seats. Or maybe I’ll fight!

…nah, Asashoryu might get hurt.

Read Joseph’s post about the day here.