Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, December 24th, 2009
dr4b	1:32a	If you are a terrorist, please do not read this (Seattle Flights) I'm taking my usual United 875/876 back. Just bought the tickets. Sick of debating about it. Jan 12, 2010 United 876 Departs Tokyo: 5:30pm Arrives Seattle: 9:09am Feb 23, 2010 United 875 Departs Seattle: 1:38pm Arrives Tokyo: Feb 24th, 5pm I do not know exactly what other plans lie in the middle. There WILL be a week or so spent in Philly/DC so I can visit my family and see my father's grave (in theory, I should probably time it for around Jan 26th so it'll be one year) and so on, but I don't know exactly when. The other likely weekend trip at some point is San Francisco since I didn't get around to it last year. In the meantime, if anyone wants stuff from Japan, or wants to see me while I'm in the US, let me know! Or better yet, if you know some kind of short contract work I could do while I'm over there... well, I guess in theory I should really be working on writing my book while I'm there :) (And for the record, yes, this means I don't think I'll be working in Yokohama in February. I just think it might be better for my mental health to come back to the US for a longer trip.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
dr4b	11:56p	Bleh Today was a day off, so I spent it doing nothing. Well, nothing except going frantic about what to do about going back to the US. Ugh. Worrying about a job for next year sucks. It'd be nice if I could come back to my current school, but that gets complicated. (They want me back and I want to come back, but the entire ALT dispatching thing is what makes it difficult, since we don't know what company will have Arakawa ward.) I left the house for a few hours to go get dinner, ending up at Heiroku, and then at Ito Yokado to try to find some stickers to put on some final papers at school. But I couldn't really find anything I liked. Also, I got tachiyomi sniped at the bookstore -- I was looking through some magazines, and decided I wanted to get the recent issue of Koshien no Hoshi, since it pretty much covered EVERY player I was a fan of this past year (down to having an interview between the Naokis from Nihon Bunri). So I stopped reading it and picked up another magazine to look through, and while I was reading an article about my Hosei baseball crush Kisho Kagami, some other dude picked up the Koshien magazine and started tachiyoming it -- and he took it and it was their last copy! DOH. I guess I'll pick it up somewhere else, since I only got halfway through reading the aforementioned interview, too. Bleh. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 21st, 2009
dr4b	1:05a	Sunday shopping and stuff Actually, I have an advice question: for a party on Tuesday night for the teachers at school, we're supposed to buy a gift for a small gift exchange, like 1000 yen or less. I looked around Yokado and such tonight a bit and I think I've decided that I will either buy a scarf -- or some kind of food set, there are a lot of little gift sets of like, small cookies or cakes or Japanese sweets and crackers and whatnot... so getting one for 1000 yen would be pretty easy. I just can't decide which is better... food gifts is very Japanese and at least there's no worries of whether a male or female ends up getting the present. Eh. Anyway, for the rest of the day... I went to the Tokyo Dome and I got the Fighters 2010 calendar, FINALLY! There was some cosplay event going on around there which was pretty crazy, but I avoided it and ran to the train station. After that I headed to Shibuya, with the intention of going to the Book-Off there, and getting lunch. Lunch ended up being at Wendy's (since they are closing down all the Wendy's in Japan in 10 days supposedly, so I tried the teriyaki burger there for the first and last time. It wasn't bad, wasn't great either). I didn't find anything I was looking for at Book-Off, but I did find an Ichiro photo book from 2000, which is really crazy to look through now. There's a taiyaki stand in Shibuya now, but the line was so long I didn't get to try any. Maybe some time that isn't a Sunday. I also passed by a board game store on my way to Suidobashi! But it is closed on Sundays. Stupid Sundays. I came home to Akabane, stopping off at Daiso for a few cheap art supplies I wanted, and then the aforementioned looking around Yokado. At home I finally watched the DVD of Swing Girls that I picked up last weekend. What a good movie! I never actually saw Water Boys, so that might be coloring my perception of this one (or maybe not coloring, as it is) but Swing Girls was a surprisingly well-made comedy while still being a marching band geek movie of sorts. It's basically about a group of idiot girls at a high school who screw up bento lunches and poison the entire marching band, so they get blackmailed into sitting in... and start taking up brass instruments... only to get kicked back out when the real band recovers. In the meantime, they decide they actually LIKE playing brass instruments and want to form a jazz band, so they end up being "Swing Girls and a Boy", as the actual central character is a boy named Nakamura who wants to quit marching band and then does in order to lead the Swing Girls group. (And he's played by Hiraoka Yuta before he was all ikemen-like, which is great.) I ended up watching it twice through in one sitting, partially because the actors REALLY laid on the Tohoku-ben and it was kinda hard to understand their accents. But yeah, it was probably a nice way to get geared up for seeing the Nodame Cantabile movie sometime in the next week or two, as it's another music-related movie with Ueno Juri. And well, I worked on my art project. Now I am pretty zonked and ought to sleep... (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
dr4b	1:13p	This week I've written a lot, but it's been all friends-locked and about school. But actually, there isn't much to talk about this week aside from school. Monday and Tuesday I pretty much did nothing in the evening, just some solo karaoke and some laundry and PP and things like that. Wednesday I played volleyball, Thursday I had a job interview of sorts, and Friday I... nothing really. Was supposed to go to a party, got diverted. I guess I could mention that volleyball was actually pretty good this week, we had an even number of guys and girls, which makes a big difference. Also a crazy dude from Singapore who is in Tokyo for 2 weeks and for whatever reason decided to come play volleyball with us. But he had bad knees and couldn't jump, so he was just the permanent setter on whichever team he was on, and we rotated around him. Yesterday was Saturday and so I went to isamum's Christmas dinner. In past years he usually has a whole bunch of Keio kids there from the English club, but apparently this year due to a combination of things like an event at Keio, and another guy getting the flu, there was only Sam's family and me and another guy there. Oops. Well, it just meant a smaller group to hang out and chat for several hours. It also meant lots of leftovers -- they had made a turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and all kinds of stuff, so Sam's wife sent me home with a care package, and because I know I'm so notoriously bad at ever eating leftovers, I just ate it as a midnight snack. Bad, but worse than letting it go to waste IMO. Plus it helped me fall asleep for a good long nap. Now, Sunday. Not a lot to accomplish today per se -- I have a small art project I want to do, and I'm gonna go scour the tokyo dome again in hopes of a Fighters calendar. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 14th, 2009
dr4b	1:17a	Full Moon Ramen So all I accomplished today in the end was: Making 4 Christmas cards that I owe kids at school (long story, not in public entry) Doing laundry Watching the Koshien Bowl football game Not playing TOO much Puzzle Pirates Getting ramen from Mangetsu Scouring Akabane Book-Off Watching the movie "ブタがいた教室", aka School Days With A Pig I mentioned the Koshien Bowl a bit before. Kansai ended up beating Hosei 50-38. I was not surprised. While Hosei got in a few good drives, Kansai just had a better offense, period, though I became rather fond of Hosei's long-haired freak running back Hara-kun. Interestingly, the marching band plays the same stuff for football as they do for baseball. I guess the weirdest part of the day, though, was actually Mangetsu. It's a ramen shop that isamum recommended a few weeks ago. Anyway, it's a little family-run ramen place that's on the back street from LaLa Garden, so you don't usually pass by it unless you're meaning to go on that road, or taking the shortcut back from Daiei. So I walked up to it, tentatively... and looked in and an old guy was staring at me from the door, in a "WTF is the white person doing here sort of way," and he said, "Ramen desu." ("We have ramen.") I said something like "はい、そうです。友達から、この店は赤羽の一番美味しいラーメンだ。。。と言われた。" ("I know... my friend said this was the tastiest ramen in Akabane.") I don't really remember, it was a bit odd because the guy and his wife (I assume) were looking at me really really weird so I was kind of nervous. But I sat down and looked through their menu and ordered the white miso ramen, just because miso ramen is my favorite. (Looking back I see that is one of the ones Sam recommended, but I didn't remember that at the time.) So, the upshot is that the ramen itself was very good, it is infact homemade noodles which are really yummy, and their miso soup, I'm not quite sure what was in it. It was just spicy enough to make my nose run a little, but not too spicy. They had sprouts and some other veggies that I couldn't entirely identify in it, but they were good. And the bowl was HUGE! But it cost 880 yen, which is a lot for a bowl of ramen, but this was pretty good stuff. When I was on my way out I was the only customer left there somehow, so they asked me what I thought, if it really was the best ramen in Akabane, and I said it was definitely the most interesting I'd had... I asked about the menu and they told me about some of the various stuff they have, like the tofu ramen and the carbo ramen and so on. And after that they kind of grilled me, like "Who recommended this place to you?" and I'm like "uh... a friend who lives nearby in west Akabane, I was complaining there aren't any good ramen shops out there", and they're like "no, I mean, a Japanese person, not a foreign person, right?" "Yeah, a Japanese person." I guess maybe they don't get a lot of white people in there. The wife seemed particularly interested in finding out about me, so she was like "you a student? working at a company? what?" and I said I was an English teacher. "Where? Near here?" "No, in Arakawa." At this, the old man perked up and started asking me about Arakawa, seems he grew up near Tabata or something to that effect, so it turned into a lot of "Oh, do you know Arakawa Yuen? Do you like it? Do you take the Toden?" and so on, which was a little weird. I always wonder why people are so interested in finding out exactly where I work, which always makes me feel a little paranoid. I think they got the impression I work at Ogu Elementary school though. But, I paid and left, and then the wife yelled after me to wait a minute, and she gave me a little piece of paper that was a 30-yen-off ticket, and it had the store's phone number and info and all on it, so she was like "no, really, please come back sometime." I guess I'll try to come back maybe next week when it gets even colder. I'm totally a winter ramen person -- don't really like it in anything but cold weather, still can't figure out why the hell people eat it in Fukuoka in the summer :) Anyway, that aside... "School Days With A Pig" was as fantastic as expected. Maybe it hit home to me a little more than usual because my own impending end at my school, and also because the 6th-graders in the movie are not so far removed from my 7th-graders (I could even look at some of the kids in the movie and be like "Oh my god. I KNOW that kid, that's Iijima-kun," or something). The movie is based on a true story, where one day a 6th-grade homeroom teacher brings a piglet to school at the start of the year and tells the class, "We're going to raise this pig for the year and then eat it at graduation time. Sound good?" and the kids are all like "OMG CUTE!! CAN WE PET IT??" and so on, and they build a house for the pig, and they name it P-Chan (all the teachers are like "you let them NAME it?!?!") and they take turns doing all the things to take care of the pig, feeding it, cleaning up after it, giving it baths, saying goodbye to it every day before going home... in return, the pig becomes part of their class, it's very cute, he always seems to break out of his pighouse and sneak into the school at the most opportune moments. Naturally about halfway through the year, one day while eating school lunch, a girl suddenly is like "I can't eat this... this is meat just like P-chan", and another kid says "no, it's just meat, it's not him, it's different" and another kid is like "dude, isn't that discrimination? how can it be okay to eat one pig but not another?" and another kid says "But P-chan is a classmate, we can't eat a classmate," and thus the debate starts: do we eat him or not, once the year ends? Seriously, good movie. Sigh. Two weeks left... (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
dr4b	12:29p	Sigh If I wasn't an idiot, I would have been up in Nikko watching hockey this weekend. Why does it seem like I always tend to look at the schedules for these things RIGHT AFTER the necessary planning/going needs to occur? I hate Seibu for being idiots and folding their team. It doesn't seem particularly feasible to go to Hachinohe in two weeks just to watch hockey -- well, it does, actually, just kind of expensive. Don't think the Saturday-Sunday ticket would quite cut it though as the last shinkansen back is at 8pm and the game on Sunday is at 5pm, but it WOULD give me another prefecture visited, and I really have no other excuse whatsoever to go to Aomori. (I'm thinking it might be neat to see how many of the 47 prefectures I can go to -- not just ride a train through. My thought is, for example, I have been to Yamaguchi prefecture -- even if all I really did there was get out and eat dinner in Iwakuni city. But I haven't really been to Saga prefecture, since all I did was ride a train through it. I never exited a train station in Tokushima or Kagawa, so I still haven't been there either.) What I don't get is, it seems like hockey games here sell out pretty well, so why are the teams in such dire financial straits? I guess part of it is just that all the arenas are so small (which is also probably why they sell out), but still, this seems like more of the typical Japanese idiocy about sports management here. EDIT: So instead, I am watching college football on TV, Hosei University vs. Kansai University in the Koshien Bowl this afternoon. How fucking weird! They turned the outfield at Koshien into a football field, the outfield stands are packed but the infield stands are the "far away cheap seats". Hosei is up 3-0 on a ridiculously long drive (it took 10 minutes) and a field goal, but Kansai seems like the better team so we'll see. Also, the Hosei marching band does play some of the same songs for this as they do for baseball. Heh. Very weird, why do I always end up watching Hosei sports? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
dr4b	3:50a	still awake Today I wandered down to Jimbocho as I seem to do so often these days. The goal this time was to go to Biblio, which is a sports bookstore (Jimbocho is, for the record, the used bookstore neighborhood in Tokyo, and a lot of the stores specialize in one particular kind of book, even down to things like there being a "military history" used bookstore, or a store which I swear specializes basically just in dictionaries. Things like that). I figured maybe they would have the issues of 大学野球 that I'm looking for. And they're closed on Sundays, and I basically always seem to be down there on Sundays, so today was Saturday and they were open. But, no, they didn't have the stuff I was looking for. They did have some awesome old college baseball magazines from the 1980's and 1990's, but they all cost like 2500 yen, so no way would I get that unless I had some good reason to. And you can't look through them, either, which bites. I did sell them a few of my books/magazines but the guy gave me like, 10 yen per book. Sheesh. Um, does anyone want my old copy of You Gotta Have Wa? Now that I have the new edition I don't really need the old one... it's 20 years old but has some great stories about Japanese baseball in it. Oh yeah, I went there via the Tokyo Dome. The Fighters calendar is still not out, which is making me basically say WTF. And I got curry for dinner on the way. Hooray. I did a lot of walking today, which was my sub-goal. From Jimbocho I headed to Kanamecho, which is near Ikebukuro, and went to Book-Off. I also went to the new Book-Off in Ikebukuro proper. I was looking for DVDs to watch while I'm sitting at home buried under my kotatsu. I saw a lot of stuff but didn't want to pay a lot (I'm considering going back to get The Magic Hour anyway, even at 2450 yen, so I can bring it to the US and make Carl watch it) so I ended up getting a Tokyo Big 6 College Baseball DVD -- from the Spring of 2007 season, and then I also got Swing Girls (movie about high school girls in a jazz band), and Buta ga Ita Kyoshitsu ("The Classroom With A Pig", a movie about a teacher who has his 6th-graders adopt and raise a pig for a year and says they have to kill and eat it at the end, I read about this ages ago but never saw it). When I came home, I ended up watching the Tokyo Big 6 DVD three times in a row while playing Puzzle Pirates. How doubly dorky is that? It's basically that during the Spring 2007 season, thanks to Yuki Saitoh showing up at Waseda and being the most famous high school baseball player in the country at the time, some TV station wanted to air his games on TV, but the league said "If you air his games, you have to air ALL the teams," or something like that, so as a result they took tons of footage of that semester of baseball and were able to make a DVD afterwards with clips from all the games. It is VERY VERY VERY Saitoh-centric, but to their credit they do show at least something from every single matchup every single weekend. I was looking out for some players that I know played though and they were barely shown at all. On the other hand, there's a lot of footage of Keio's Mikinori Katoh... I forgot how much I liked him :) I only saw him pitch once or twice in the minors this year with Yakult. Oh yeah, and all those guys like Kume, Shigenobu, Mizuta, Ohzawa, they're in there. Shashiki has a feature as "Another rookie that Saitoh pitched to!!" and they do show when Yuichi Suzuki hit a home run, but barely. Things like that. Mostly it is all about Waseda and Saitoh. Lots of Keijiro, ew, but also lots of Hosoyamada, yay, and Yukinaga Tanaka (yay!) Also Kota Suda, who I had also forgotten about. Yawn. Not sure what I will do with my Sunday. I could do things at home, but I'm worried I'll just end up doing nothing instead. I have some cards to make for people at school... and more books/magazines to sort through. (I thought of getting rid of them, but it's hard to do.) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
dr4b	12:47a	Logging this week Tuesday was Ito-Yokado-Food-And-Hide-Under-The-Kotatsu day. Wednesday was up in Saitama for the genkai-black-company-whatever movie, so I ate dinner at Kua'Aina as I often do when I go up there. It was yummy :) Also, Uniqlo. Wish turtlenecks were also 690 yen like the other longsleeve shirts. Thursday was in Shinjuku. I got kaitensushi at that crazy bright place right near the east exit that I have walked by a bazillion times but never actually ate at. It wasn't bad, was kind of interesting actually because they have two levels of conveyor belts, so new stuff goes on the higher one first as it comes out. Today is Friday, but I was at school until almost 7pm, so I just came home, grabbed food from Yokado and hid under the kotatsu again. It's been raining all day. You know, I rewatched Touch tonight, and I can honestly say that while I appreciate the story and all, I think part of what majorly ruins the movie for me is Masami Nagasawa. But what REALLY gets me is, now that I have actually lived in Tokyo for a while and been to so many stadiums and all... when you have a scene that is supposed to take place in west Tokyo, and somehow Minami is supposed to run from her house and take a bus and wind up at Jingu stadium to watch Tatsuya pitch the final innings, and what ACTUALLY happens is Minami runs through part of Urawa, arrives somehow at Jingu stadium anyway, runs around Jingu to the OUTFIELD entrance, runs into the stadium... and actually runs into the infield of OMIYA STADIUM. Seriously, why the fuck couldn't they just get Jingu for real for the movie, rather than showing the outside of Jingu and the inside of Omiya? I guess Japanese people are willing to cut them slack out of love for the story, but I can't be the only one going "And now starring Omiya Stadium as Jingu..." It was kind of like back when they filmed Wonder Boys at CMU, and anyone who actually lived in the area would watch certain scenes like "Wait, where's the wormhole such that they just turned right on a street in Shadyside to end up on a street in the north hills?" (Or whatever. It's been 10 years since they made that movie, so I kind of forget.) I still like H2 better, anyway. Ugh, there has to be a way to balance hiding under the kotatsu and actually getting anything useful done on my laptop. (3 Comments |Comment on this)