Darlo's World

Today is Valentine’s Day, a day in which couples get sappier and singles get whinier, generally speaking that is. Being one of the latter it did mean that I was free to enjoy my day without the social obligations of meeting the missus. But that doesn’t mean I completely missed out on the tradition.

In Japan the tradition (in a nut-shell) is for girls to give chocolate to boys. There’re two kinds of chocolate depending on who you’re giving it to, and I don’t mean with nuts or without … although reading between the lines it probably does. First is 義理チョコ (girichoko) which you’d give to someone you feel you have a social obligation toward. This might be your boss, teacher, dorm manager, but not only people ‘socially higher’ than you, you might choose to give some to your friends and so on.

On the flip side to this is 本命チョコ (honmeichoko) which you’d give to your boyfriend, lover, husband or a boy that you fancy. Don’t worry girls, boys will come to return the favour next month on White Day, and for guys who got no chocolate, we can all get together and celebrate the Korean Black Day in April, but more on those days as they come.

My plan for today involved a trip to 日本橋 (Nippombashi) and Denden Town. If you remember my previous blogs it’s an area that’s known as the 秋葉原 (Akihabara) or Osaka, with plenty of manga and anime related stores, cafes and … stuff. So we headed downstairs (in the lift) and were greeted by the dorm manager. His wife had bought a small piece of chocolate for all the dorm residents (male dorm don’t forget). How kind of her; clearly this was girichoko (especially since it was her husband who gave it to us).

This wasn’t the only chocolate I received this year though. During the week some of my friends who frequent the Ajisai room had brought in their own home-made chocolate and biscuits and shared them around. Delish!

As usual Nippombashi was tons of fun and rumaging around the second hand book shops I found plenty of cheap manga, starting as low as 10 yen (about 8 pence by today’s exchange rate). As per usual DVD’s are expensive, though some stores here were considerably cheaper than the status-quo, and walking past the doujinshi covers you could see the usual ‘dripping’ images. Funnily enough afterwards I was talking with another friend about whether doujins are rated on some sort of ‘drip-scale’ or ‘dripometer’. Don’t get me wrong however, I did spot some of a non-sexual nature, and had I been interested in the series may have considered buying.

After my friend headed off home I stayed around for a walk and a wander. I was actually surprised how close Namba was to the area and ended up eating lunch at a Matsuya near Namba Parks. Though 95% of the time my self-navigatory skills are spot on without the use of a map, the cloudy day and the fact I’d spun in a few circles nosing around and exploring this new area meant I had no direction which way was North, and thus was a bit muddled. However (as all great men say at some point in their lives) I was not lost, I could have turned around and gone back the exact same way I had come from (something I usually find odd that people don’t do when they are ‘lost’), but prefer the fun way of walking and hoping until eventually passing out.

Thankfully I didn’t faint, but instead found a familliar sight in the distance. It was a large arcade (sega arcade I think), that I’d passed on the way. Keeping this to my right hand side I kept on walking and soon found myself on familiar ground.

On my way I found myself drawn to a particular retailer. The small table-top store was selling Monopoly … Osaka Edition! Now I can’t remember if my familly (we’re competitive when it comes to Monopoly) had asked me to buy one in Japan, but me here staring the the Osakan version of Monopoly took my by complete surprise! The only thing stopping me from buying it was the price of 4500 yen (£33.97 by today’s exchange rate). Even now I’m still umming and ahhing about it. I guess I’ve still got some time left here so I don’t need to make a rush decision about it.

To get to Nippombashi it cost me 230 yen (£1.74) on the underground, but me being me, the stubborn money saving twazzerk, thought “nuts to that” and walked home. Quite ironic when you consider my Monopoly incident. The walk (which according to google is just over 3 and a half miles) took somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 hours. Due to complications with a watch and a phone call, I really don’t know.

It was actually on the way home that I made my biggest cock-up of the day, possibly the week (or longer >_<). When things are put ‘on sale’ in Japan, they might be marketed by a number of prices rather than the one you actually pay. To be fair this isn’t something that’s exclusive to Japan, just think of the times in shops you’ve seen £10 in huge letting next to something expensive only to look at the very small ‘off’ next to it. Well todays balls up was quite simple. I saw a sign saying 800 yen (£6.04) and jeans. Due to an unfortunate split in one of my pairs of bottoms I’ve been left juggling between a few pairs as of late.

Anyway, after nosing through the rail which was out the front of the store, I eventually found a pair that matched my size. Smiling like an idiot at the thought of picking up a bargain, I take my new jeans into the store and head for the desk. Something struck me the moment I entered the shop, and it wasn’t the low signage by the door. This was a nice looking shop, the kind where it looks like all they need to do is sell one thing in order to cover all their overheads, the kind of shop I never (like to) enter!

Being served by two very well dressed well mannered young men felt somewhats off-putting, me standing their in an old work-uniform coat, a University club jumper and jeans that … well, they’re almost as holy as the Pope. When it came for me to pay I stuttered and stammered. I had misread the sign outside, and the jeans were 800 yen off, not 800 yen. A total of 2800 yen (£21.14) for the jeans was paid, 2000 yen over what this idiot had thought they were. To be fair (trying to justify stupidity is something that can seldom be done well, but I’ll give it a go) even at 2800 yen, compared to other shops I’ve been here they were pretty cheap. A lot of people may say that Uni-Qlo is Japan’s cheapest clothing store, and about as close to Primark (oh beloved Primark) as you can get, but in my eye it’s still expensive. Perhaps it’s all these years of buying Tesco and Asda jeans that have conditioned my mind.

Oh, and yes Nippombashi has maid cafes … no, I haven’t been in one … yet. ¬_¬

Sitting here chomping on a rather large niku-man from the 7-eleven, I’m happy to be able to say that I’m now well again. So catching up from last week, I did try to relax and sleep most of the weekend away and that (combined with the 4 different medicines I was taking) was just what the doctor ordered, literally. Come Sunday afternoon I was feeling much better and managed to keep down some small foods, though it did leave an odd feeling in the bottom of my gut.

Monday morning was the day of my make-up test, obviously my confidence was taking a trip that day. Harsh as it may seem, I was kind of hoping that other people may have been ill on the Friday so that I wouldn’t have to take the test alone. But no, no one else. There’s something incredibly weird about having to take a test alone. The room had no clock and my watch had died some time before, so I had to try to estimate how long I was taking on each section. When the test was over I handed in my paper and headed down to the Ajisai room.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the Ajisai room is one of the few places I can talk to native Japanese speakers in a relaxed atmosphere. I feel kind of guilty asking friends to come all the way to Osaka from Kobe for the mere purpose of hanging out, and on the reverse side of the coin I really don’t always fancy going to another prefecture for the same reason. Once again my random conversations were had and a few games of Mario Kart DS also.

Since my Japanese language classes were over for the year, I only had my linguistics assignment left to worry about. Well, that and my assignment from Leeds that’s due early in January. Thus between this and sleep, not a lot’s actually happened this week.

On Wednesday we had our final Business class, and since the last exam was already done and dusted we had a little bit of a party. Our sensei brought in a range of Japanese munchies and we had a bit of a quiz (on the subject of mergers and acquisitions). Winning myself some a red-bean mochi, by answering that Nestle were the only foreign chocolate maker with a base in kansai, I started to unwrap the squidgy food.

This is the first time I’d tried mochi and to be honest it was probably the last. I’ve not been a big fan of red-bean paste since first trying it in a donut some time ago; I find they remind me too much of kidney beans, which I do like (with rice) but not in a sweet sense. The mochi itself consists of a gelatinous rice which I’m told has been pounded repeatadly to give it its form. It is a very chewy and powdery kind of cake, but for me it didn’t really have enough flavour.

Next year my classes and class times will be changing, so Thursday was the final time I would be going to my Practical Athletics Training class; where I am the only foreigner. To mark the occaision I decided to really push myself and improved on all my levels on each piece of equipment. I won’t say what they all are (because frankly I don’t remember them but have them written down at the gym), but do remember that I ‘abcrunched’ 56kg. Bare in mind I’m only 66kg myself.

This was also the day of the last Linguistics class, which in turn meant that my linguistics assignment was due the following day. After working through the night, napping on the floor at times, I had my essay finished at about 7 o’clock on Friday morning. Throughout the essay I discovered an extra thing about Chiri Kitsu, a character in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, and an extra about the Itoshiki family, that I didn’t research online.

Firstly, thanks to a friends linguistic project on mimetics, I realised that ‘Chiri’ can also mean curly or frizzy. This is a reference to Chiri Kitsu’s true hairstyle, rather than the straight, perfectly split down the centre look she usually goes for. As for the Itoshiki family, well when you combine the kanji used for the family name (a running joke in relation to all the family members), and add the kanji for home (read as ie), then you are given zekke, meaning extinct family. I would have put those up here in their kanji versions, but not everyone who reads this can view kanji properly on their computers, so the links will have to do.

I got my marks back from Japanese and although they seem to be quite low compared to the status quo, they do seem to be a vast improvement to my marks at Leeds. Personally I could argue that this is because at Leeds everything was new and here for the first part of the year we covered old material, but would like to think that being in a country where I can put my degree topic to use on an almost daily basis had something to do with it too. Once again my speaking saving the day over all, which is ironic when you think about it.

On the subject of speaking, a few times yesterday I have had encounters of speaking with people I didn’t know, and with me still being alive and well, I can only assume that I did well. I first had to go to the local ward office to change my address details for my National Health Insurance, then on the way back home I had a good conversation with woman selling takoyaki. I know this chat went well because she threw in some extra pieces for free, calling them a welcome gift. Finally last night I went to a bar a few doors down the road where I was enticed by the fact that they advertised selling Red Stripe, a Jamaican beer. The conversation was great as I was the only other person in there (this has become something of a habit, being the only other person in a bar) and the Red Stripe was good, though very expensive.

Recently I’ve got back to playing a bit of old school gaming with Rockstar Games giving away it’s original Grand Theft Auto and GTA 2 via download. It has been a nice stress buster aswell, giving that you can easilly go on a murderous rampage for little to no reason whatsoever and then turn off and go on your merry way. Of course, that is if you’re over 18. Let’s face it, when people moan that the youth of today are being warped because of games like this, we really have to look at how they’re getting them, and in many cases it seems to be the parent’s buying them for them. I’ve included the the links for them above, so do enjoy going back in time before realism was all that people wanted in games like this.

Finally, Christmas is coming. Though I’ve never been a fan of Christmas back home, everyone getting into a “gimme gimme gimme” attitude, the cold weather, the fact that starting in October everywhere shoves Christmas lights so far down your throat that you fart out sparkles, here it’s been quite different. The main thing I’ve noticed is the disctinct lack of a Christmas atmosphere. Yes there are lights, but you don’t feel blinded everywhere you look. Yes there are people dressed in santa outfits, but they’re minimal (I don’t mean their height). And yes there are signs advertising things that would make for good christmas gifts, but this is over shadowed by the fact that in Japan it is New Year which is the key focus of the winter break. Christmas here is not a national holiday, so we will be getting food at the dorm.

I’m still going to KFC for lunch though, as it appears to be something of a Japanese tradition.