Edokko

 Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

 

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

VHS Tape Bonanza

A box of tapes on their way out of the library

The Japan Foundation Toronto is moving, and though that means a lot of changes and adjustments for those of us who found Bloor and Avenue pretty convenient, the upside is that the library is overhauling, which means clearing out old items, which means VHS TAPE GIVEAWAYS.

You might have guessed from my persistent interest in all things retro, that I have just a teensy bit of nostalgia for decades past, with the 80s/90s (my formative years) entrenched firmly at the top. That means I don't just treasure the memories of taping my favourite shows on the family VCR - I still own the family VCR. I actually received a VCR-DVD combo unit for Christmas of 2013! However, 99% of my tape collection is at my parents' house, so I left it there to begin the long project of dubbing dozens of old favourites onto DVD whenever I visit them for the holidays.

So, when the Japan Foundation Toronto decided to get rid of most of its videotape collection to save space...well, needless to say, the airport x-ray techs probably got a kick out of my suitcase as it went through the scanner on my most recent trip back home. It was so hard to resist! I found some fabulous Tokyo-in-the-late-80s-early-90s snapshots with videos like Neighborhood Tokyo, Tokyo Date, NHK The News 1985 and Norimono Ippai. Lots of glamour shots of the Yurikamome Line, pre-extension, in that last one. I also scored the Ichikawa classic Tokyo Olympiad, and four out of a set of Japanese recent-history programs covering events like the Hanshin earthquake, the marriage of the crown Prince (now Emperor), and the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which was actually just in the newspaper here, as the 30th anniversary was yesterday.

All in all, a pretty impressive bounty of pre-millennial pop culture. I'm sad that these tapes can't be borrowed from the JFT library anymore, but on the other hand, it was good timing for me, because I was able to take the time to watch and enjoy them all, and they won't end up in a landfill, either. I was happy to see how quickly the rest of the tapes (there were at least 500 given away over two days) were picked up by other patrons to take home.

Looks like at least a few others out there still have VCRs!

Japanese Music in Concert

For a music fan, I'm not willing to expend a lot of energy or cash to go and see a band - in fact, I'm lucky to go to a concert every 3 years at the most, and usually only shell out for nosebleed seats. However, I've actually seen a few really good Japanese bands while living here in North America. I've seen bands that would be playing sold-out shows in Tokyo, and paid next to nothing for them.

The secret is...anime conventions.

Almost all of the big conventions feature a musical act. Here in Toronto, I hit up Anime North every couple of years when they have a particularly interesting guest. I'm also in Baltimore almost every summer, and been able to see some fantastic acts at Otakon. T.M. Revolution, L'Arc~en~Ciel, JAM Project (including Okui Masami and Kageyama Hironobu, for you anisong fans out there!), Home Made Kazoku...all free with the price of admission to the convention. How good is that? When friends in Japan heard that I'd seen L'Arc, live, they were completely bowled over. 

In Osaka and Tokyo, I saw ZARD and AiM and Wada Kouji - now, those last two are definitely a story for another day - but going to a see a big-name show was pretty unlikely. I just don't have that kind of interest in any one band - plus I've been lucky enough to see T.M.R. in the U.S. not once but twice, and (long after this post was originally written) even ran into him on a flight between Japan and Canada!

Quite a lot of Japanese artists have come to Toronto to perform as well - Kyary Pamyu Pamyu was here a couple of weeks ago, and though someone offered to sell me their tickets at the last minute for cheap, it wasn't enough notice to actually go. Too bad! I also missed out on B'z the year before last, which was really unfortunate. These are fairly big-name artists, though, that it'd be tough to get good tickets for in Tokyo, and here they are performing at the Sound Academy in T.O.!

New York, L.A. and other bigger North American cities also have plenty of Japanese performers who slip under the radar, both at local venues and at cons. The next time you're looking to find some new J-artists, why not check out a convention? You might be surprised at who you can get to see, practically for free!

Hobonichi Techo Life

In 2008 while living in Japan, I was finally able to play MOTHER 3, a recent (at the time) sequel to a cult hit video game that I loved as a teenager. My brothers and I owned a Super Nintendo and a copy of EarthBound, by far the house's "preferred game." Released in 1994, it was a role-playing game set in rural America, starring four "normal" kids (or as normal as spunky psychics, princes and genius teenagers can get, anyway). Years later, the sequel MOTHER 3 got a Japan-only release.

For me, it was perfect timing. Uncertain how to make Japanese-speaking friends, I had been hanging out mostly with fellow JETs and exchange students from the nearby university. I spent a lot of time in my apartment chatting online with people back home and listening to Internet radio. And as it happened, that was where I had the good fortune to meet my first real Japanese friends - not in Japan, but on the Internet.

This could turn into a much longer story (and my social life isn't actually what the post is about!) so to keep it short, I'll just say that I got involved with a certain well-known EarthBound community and encountered a Japanese fan of the game within it, Mana. She was about my age and lived in Gunma-ken, a prefecture north of Tokyo. The two of us arranged a meeting during one of my visits to Tokyo and hit it off, and from then on, whenever I was in the area, I made an effort to see her and her friends that I had gotten to know. All were fans of the MOTHER series, so I went from a fairly small amount of fandom involvement to quite a lot, very quickly. 

Japan was a good place to be at the time for fans of this 20-year-old series - aside from MOTHER 3's relatively recent release, there had actually been brand-new merchandise released in arcades (Game Centers), The King of Games was selling official t-shirts out of a shop in Kyoto's Teramachi, thirty minutes from my apartment, and you could still buy the special MOTHER 3 Game Boy Micro in stores - I still regret not owning one of these! I struggled through reading the blog of MOTHER creator and copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and I went to LOFT on not one but two separate Januarys to buy his well-known Hobonichi Techo, a day planner with customizable covers and thoughtful quotes. I did not make the purchase on either occasion - after all, every year CLAIR sent us a compact, designed-for-JETs planner in the mail that I was quite fond of, and I also received a small calendar book from my school. While I wanted a techo because of the Itoi connection, I couldn't validate the expense when CLAIR's version was smaller, printed in English, and had subway maps and unit conversions on the back pages. None of the covers interested me enough to drop ¥3,500 on one, so I settled for simply looking them over whenever I visited Kyoto. There were other ways to show my MOTHER love, like this fancy colour-changing Ultimate Chimera shirt that cost an absolutely astronomical amount of money at the time.

At one point Mana-chan and friends, myself included, attended a MOTHER event in Tokyo where I even ran into into two other English-speaking members of that community, one of whom was an expat JET like me - though a CIR, not an ALT - from a few prefectures away. We hadn't really known each other at the time, certainly not enough for me to recognize them offhand, but I was completely gobsmacked to spot someone in the subway station wearing a Ness t-shirt, and rushed up to them immediately to say hello.

It's been some years since that event, and though MOTHER influences my life to this day, my active involvement has waned pretty considerably since leaving Japan. Not so of the JET I met at the event in Tokyo, Lindsay - she now translates and localizes for the company belonging to the creator of the MOTHER series, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun!

I can't tell you how awesome it is to see a fan succeed not only at entering the industry professionally, but to have the incredible good fortune (not to mention the moxie to go after it in the first place!) to work with Itoi himself. So when word got out that Hobonichi was releasing an English version of the techo, translated and localized by Lindsay, I decided it was finally my year, despite having converted over pretty thoroughly to Android's convenient Google Calendar access.

Typically, I have never been great with keeping up planners. Not since high school have I used an agenda on a regular basis. But my techo's design and ease of use (can't bring my phone into company meetings!) and stylishness and POCKETS has driven it home.

(No, I don't always save my TTC transfers!)

I use it for writing fiction ideas, dates and times and details for stories, copying the office calendar down so I can see it at home, collecting movie and concert ticket stubs, noting what foods I liked at restaurants and how much I spent, and more recently tracking Bitcoin gains and losses. I also get to use stickers I brought home from Japan and my immense Muji pen collection, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that two of the other staff in my office also have Hobonichi techos!

It's been a bit tough carrying around a book all the time when I cart around plenty of heavy things in my purse, not to mention switching from digital back to analogue again, but I'm already dreaming about putting my techo on the shelf at the end of the year and having this record of 2014 to flip through again someday...it's much more personal than reading back through Twitter logs!

I guess I can't possibly be shocked that MOTHER continues to exert that subtle influence over my days. I might even have to pull out the big guns and use some of my carefully hoarded Mr. Saturn stickers.

What are you waiting for!? Start your techo life!

Writing About Tokyo

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true! 

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

Photo of the Day - Dosei-san

This oversized dosei-san character from the video game series MOTHER (known in North America as EarthBound) came
to visit arcades around Japan in 2010. He was partially animatronic and had a person inside, operating him!

My Love Affair With Uniqlo

The first time I walked into a Uniqlo store, I knew it was over.

I've never been a brand shopper - in fact, my clothing shopping mantra has usually been "get in, get out, I don't have to try it on do I!?" And the cheaper the better. Up until the point where I stepped into Yodobashi Camera's 7th floor Uniqlo store, I didn't care about my clothes or where I bought them. Now, I'm stockpiling money to finance a shopping trip to New York City, specifically so that I can go to Uniqlo.

My students teased me about this sometimes - hard to say whether that was because Uniqlo clothes are inexpensive, or simply because I bought 90% of my summer wardrobe there. (Hey, I didn't really need a summer wardrobe on the East Coast, so why bother spending money for clothes you'll get three weeks' wear out of?) I didn't mind, because I was so thrilled to have found the awesome place that is Uniqlo. Short for "Unique Clothes," this store delivers everything in bright colours at great prices, with an amazing turnover rate for fashions. If I found something I liked but was a bit expensive, I could usually go back six weeks later and get it for 50% off. Their colour range is so dynamic and it was easy to find 'basic' items, which is great when you like layering. The tank tops and legging offerings were fantastically diverse. And the one-piece dresses!

They've been expanding rapidly, so if you're lucky enough to live in any other country but Canada, please get yourself to this store. And take me with you!

The Takarazuka Revue; A Woman's World

If you've never heard of the Takarazuka Revue, let me open up this post with an image:

Tsuki-gumi's newest production, Romeo & Juliet(te), opens on August 10

These two are Manaki Reika and Ryuu Masaki, popular stars in the world of the Takarazuka theatre. Ryuu/Romeo is an otokoyaku - that is, a woman who exclusively plays male roles within the troupe. Takarazuka's biggest draw is that it's for women, by women, even if the women are pretending to be men - and most of them pretend very well! 

Star Troupe's Aran Kei as Percy Blakeney
in The Scarlet Pimpernel, 2008

The Revue was formed by Ichizo Kobayashi, then-President of Hankyu Railways, a private railroad well-known in Kansai. The city of Takarazuka in Hyogo Prefecture, popular for its hot springs, was at the time the terminus of Hankyu's train line from Osaka City. In 1914 he created the Takarazuka Revue to be a further tourist draw for the area, and designed it to be all-female, based on the way that kabuki was traditionally performed entirely by men. It wasn't long before the musicals and their finales with showgirl-costumes, sparkles and glitter charmed the women who flocked to see the shows. The Takarazuka Grand Theatre was built a decade later.

Since then, the Revue has performed hundreds of shows both original and adapted from Western musicals and Eastern classics, and has a second theatre in Tokyo. There are five troupes within the Revue that each have their own style and way of performing, and marquee showtime is rotated between them to ensure that each troupe has plenty of time to prepare their latest feature. The five are called Hana (Flower), Tsuki (Moon), Hoshi (Star), Yuki (Snow) and Sora (Cosmos). Each troupe is also associated with certain characteristics, such as Soa being the 'experimental' group as the newest of the five, Yuki is heavily operatic, Hana produces the top otokoyaku stars, and so on.

Becoming a Takarasienne is tough. Training is competitive and starts at high school age. No more than 50 applicants each year are accepted to the Academy. Otokoyaku training is even tougher work, as they are expected to dress, behave and speak in a masculine form from their second year of schooling. They work on deepening their voices to sing and speak in a more masculine tone, and carry themselves as refined men would.

Takarazuka Grand Theatre in Takarazuka City
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Takarazuka audience is said to be about 90% female, and looking at the real thing, I would have estimated the numbers to be even higher than that. While in Japan I saw multiple performances, including The Scarlet Pimpernel, Love and Death in Arabia / Red Hot Sea, Phoenix Wright, The Legend of the Great King and Four Gods and The Rose of Versailles -André- / Exciter!  I was very excited to see Elizabeth, but they were very much sold out for the times we could go. 

Gyakuten Saiban (Phoenix Wright)
performed at Bow Hall in Tokyo by Sora-gumi

I was drawn to Takarazuka when I heard they had performed The Rose of Versailles, a manga I particularly liked in my university days. Tezuka Osamu also drew inspiration from the Revue for his classic Princess Knight, which I'd read at the language orientation in Osaka and is often credited as the very first manga written for girls. (Tezuka was raised in Takarazuka City and one of its other big draws is the Tezuka Museum - more on that in another post.) Luckily, Emily's host mother during her study abroad had been a fan and taken her a few times, and Laura and Marisa were also Takurazuka companions. One of my co-workers, Tanaka-sensei, was a huge fan and we went to see a Rose of Versailles side story together. I was so fortunate to have gotten to see so many shows - living in the Kansai area really does give you access to everything!

Krispy Kreme Japan

One of my first impressions of Tokyo was courtesy of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Rather, it was the Krispy Kreme doughnut frenzy personally witnessed at the Shinjuku Southern Terrace.

These people waited about 45-60 minutes for their doughnuts - in the rain!

When I arrived in Japan, there was only one Krispy Kreme, and it was incredibly popular, as you might expect - the Japanese have an appreciation for trying new things, particularly when they are famous, particularly when it comes to food. They also have an affinity for standing in line - I'm told that after waiting in a long line to try something, you are more likely to be appreciative of your purchase by the time you reach the head. By the time I reach the head of a long line, especially an outdoor one, I'm usually murderous, but I'm not Japanese, so I can't claim to understand this one.

At Tokyo Orientation, we received some information about the area around our hotel, including a map with a legend. Krispy Kreme was marked there, with a warning "First K.K. in Japan, very popular, expect a line." (They now have 27 locations, and counting!) Krispy Kreme had left Toronto some years before, and it had been a long time since I'd been able to have my favourite K.K. doughnut, the Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled, so I decided to head over there. I'd even read up on it on Wikipedia when I was trying to check out things to do in Tokyo - the store had been built almost a year before, so I figured the long lineups had probably petered out by now. 

Hot and fresh!

Well...they hadn't. Even though it was already eight o'clock in the evening, when I found the place, the queue had fifty or more people in it. We were handed menus and free doughnuts in line, at least, and the doughnut creation process was just inside the window for us to watch while we waited. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was very fortunate to have gotten inside the store within thirty minutes of joining the line. Unfortunately, the cream-filled chocolate iced variety are not available in Japan, but I got a half-dozen other exciting new kinds, including a most excellent lime-filled powdered dougnut.

The interesting Japan-only flavours are what kept me coming back each time I was in Shinjuku. Krispy Kreme Japan offers a fantastic seasonal menu that is always changing and is usually themed. (I couldn't get behind the coffee theme. Sorry, K.K.) Though I hated the fake-tasting fruit-filled doughnuts that used to come in a dozen from Tim Hortons, Krispy Kreme did these powdery little delights perfectly. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in Japan when Cassis or Lime flavours are on the rotation, don't miss them!

The bounty: four dozen doughnuts that we
divided up between us for omiyage

The next time I was in Tokyo, for Tokyo Game Show 2007, I thought I would bring back Krispy Kreme as omiyage (souveniers) for my co-workers back in Osaka. However, this time the line was four times as long. When we came back later that night, we were lucky to get away with an hour-long wait.

The funny thing is, every time I passed the Shinjuku Southern Terrace over the next three years, the queue was out the door - and sometimes stretching halfway back to the Takashimaya building. Yet when we visited their brand-new Shibuya location less than a month after its grand opening, there was almost no lineup at all - at ten a.m. on a Saturday! 

I suppose that even now, doughnuts are just not acceptable breakfast food in Japan!

Shinsedai

The Shinsedai festival here in Toronto is coming up very soon, and you fans of Japanese cinema don't want to miss this!

The festival showcases independent and rarely seen Japanese films and is by far the most accessible way to check out non-mainstream cinema and offerings from fresh new filmmakers, subtitled in English. This is the Festival's 4th year running and promises to be a great success!

The venue is at 400 Roncesvalles Avenue, and the thirteen full-length films, as well as a handful of short films, will all be screened between July 12th and July 15th. Interested? Find out more and reserve tickets at the Shinsedai website!

Shinsedai Cinema Festival 2012

Urusei Yatsura

The book, which I haven't seen in years,
goes for $60+ on Amazon nowadays.
Oh.

About ten years ago I picked up a manga called Lum: Urusei Yatsura as reading material in a comic shop while on a trip to Halifax. It was literally the best deal on the shelf (back in the day when Japanese comics were not even 1/10th as mainstream as they are now!); 400 pages for $15 dollars. We were in for a long ride back to St. John's, so it was perfect.

I remember not being sold on Lum at the time. It was a little too wacky for me, and the "collection" nature of the book made it hard to follow at times. Still, as I was going through my photos from orientation to post on Tadaimatte, I remembered something that made me smile: on my first day in Osaka, while staying at the Dotonbori Hotel, the only thing on television that night was Urusei Yatsura. I walked in halfway through, so I didn't really get what was going on, but it was a relief to me to find something familiar to watch once it became too late to go outside in the unfamiliar city. The movie was Only You - you can check out the trailer below.

While I was thinking back to that, I decided to give Urusei Yatsura another try by watching the films, and over the past week or two have been doing that and finding that I'm enjoying the series considerably more. I'd developed a distinct taste for Takahashi Rumiko's vintage collections  long ago (Maison Ikkoku is my favourite manga) and while Urusei Yatsura is not her best work, it is still funny and lighthearted. It does contain many of the elements that I love about Ikkoku, a series that came a short while later, and clearly after learning a few lessons about the direction she wanted to take her work.

I know many people enjoyed the more well-known Inuyasha, but in my opinion, 'slice of life' stories are what Takahashi Rumiko does best. I'd definitely like to see her return to this sort of project someday.

Only You

Anime and Manga

Don't really have many photos of anime-ish stuff in Japan, but here's an amazing birthday
cake with a Dragon Ball character on it that Emily got me for my birthday in 2009. Fantastic.

When I first started taking Japanese classes, I'll admit that it was interest in anime that got me there, and not the other way around. From junior high school on, I was a devout fan of the Japanese animated shows that were on television here in Canada, starting with Astro Boy and progressing to Sailor Moon, Samurai Pizza Cats, The Wizard of Oz, Dragon Ball and others. It was after I started going to the local anime society in 10th grade that I got really interested in watching shows in their native Japanese, with English subtitles.

I did a fair amount of growing up between then and when I left for Japan; I had begun to move on to other things by the time I graduated, as I had so many hobbies that I rarely had time watch anime. (I still read manga, when I can afford it.) Fans, I'm sure, would probably consider it an incredible waste that I went to Japan after this had happened!

I clearly remember a conversation I had with my vice-principal and my go-between in the car as we left Osaka Orientation, and they asked if I liked manga. This was the first time I had met either of them and I wanted to make a good impression; didn't want to look like what some JETs referred to as an "akiba-boy/akiba-girl," someone who only came to Japan for the chance to go to Akihabara and buy toys. At the same time, I couldn't exactly lie, so I replied "sometimes," and they asked what series I liked.

Scrambling for one that wasn't too associated with 12-year-olds, I replied that I liked Hikaru no Go (a series I hadn't read in many years), and then had to field questions for the next five minutes on the plot of Hikaru no Go and whether I could play Go and so on. Oops.

Mittsume ga Tooru figure.
Tezuka Osamu, creator of this series as well as classics
like Astro Boy, is said to be "the father of manga."

Still, when I was there, the mere exposure to so much animated goodness had me back into it on a smaller scale. This is mostly thanks to the SkyPerfect satellite service - on my first month in Osaka, all the JETs did a weekend of seminars at a local language institute to help speed us along on our journey to Daily Life In Japan. We had a fair amount of down-time and I hadn't made any close friends yet, so I spent a lot of it in my room watching TV. There were two channels that showed a ton of nostalgic shows that I hadn't seen in years - Pocket Monsters (the original version of Pokemon), Ranma 1/2, Dragon Ball Z and the like. The channels were Animax and Kids' Station, and they showed anime both new and old, 24/7. I decided then and there that I was buying a satellite dish. Soon, SkyPerfect TV was streaming gems to me like Maison Ikkoku, Cat's Eye, Minky Momo, KochiKame, Touch, Nodame Cantobile, Sailor Moon, Kaiketsu Zorori, Dokonjō Gaeru, Detective Conan and Lupin III.

For a long time, I was so relieved to hear "easy" Japanese that I understood, I left the television on 24/7, hoping it would sink into me by osmosis.

This phase passed, and soon I was probably paying way more for my satellite service than was worth it for the amount of TV watching I was doing. The honeymoon phase of struggling through manga in Japanese was also over, but it was nice having the option. On a lazy rainy day, it was good to just be able to turn on the television and know that there was probably something on worth watching - even if that something was marketed at 12-year-olds.

Salty Watermelon Pepsi

Oh my gosh. I dislike Pepsi, but I did love trying out whatever gimmick Pepsi Japan was trying next. I just wish I was in Japan for this one!

Watermelons are frequently eaten with salt in Japan - I never quite figured this one out, as I wasn't in the company of Japanese people the few times I did have watermelon there, and I don't much care for salt, personally. It's an exciting flavour, though; one that I'd like to try!