Day 3 : Yokkaichi!

I`m pretty drunk right now so I`m going to let the pictures do the talking.

Got up in the morning, packed my bags and it was off to Tokyo to catch the shinkansen.

View from Shinkansen.

Had to stop at Nagoya and took a train to Yokkaichi.

View from outside Kintetsu station in Yokkaichi.

Another picture while waiting for bframe5.

Katsudon for lunch, yum.

We went to Nagoya for the Jump shop. Yes, its a store selling all manner of memorabilia of Jump mangas.

Who would have thought after so many years, you could find a brand new awesome quality Slam Dunk poster! The only thing missing from the poster is Haruko chan!

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is an actual pokemon centre in Nagoya. No idea what they actually do to the poor pokemon at this centre though.

Aarr-kun is probably kicking himself for not coming here. No sign of Team Rocket though.

The pokemon `union room`, whatever that means. Is this where little pikachu`s are created?

Picture from Sakae, the main area of Nagoya. Went with bframe to the type of shops that gyarus like to congregrate and I had a good time washing my eyes.

After that we went back to Yokkaichi for dinner at an Okinawan izakaya.

More Okinawan food. Oh yeah, they had two 15 year old girls working at the Izakaya. :) The best thing I had there was the baka umai cha-han.

After that was the highlight of the night and of my trip so far. Went to very nice snack serviced by two beautiful girls. It had karaoke and it was time to use my hiragana training and actually sing some Japanese songs and impress Japanese girls. Got to sing

1) Ohyama Yurika - Sayonara
2) Ozaki Yutaka - Oh My Little Girl (harder to sing than I thought)
3) Zone - Secret Base (one of my favourite songs ever but the speed of the song was actually a bit too fast for my inept furigana reading speed.)
4) Matsuura Aya - Watarasebashi (love this song)
5) and a couple of English songs just to keep things interesting.

Thought about singing Yamazaki Masayoshi`s One more chance, one more time but that song is pretty fast and I`m pretty sure my furigana reading can`t keep up.

Most surprising thing is the girls actually played Ryu ga gotoku! Showed them my pictures of kabukicho. It was pretty awesome to be able to discuss one of my favourite game series ever. Life cannot get better than going to a snack, singing songs and having fun conversations. Apologies for lack of pictures but I will definitely be back and hopefully won`t be too drunk to forget. Truly gave me the feeling of I need to come back and do this again next year, hopefully with much better Japanese. Just being able to finally read and sing Japanese songs was very satifying.

One of the customers was talking about this oppai bar he went to where you play strip games against the girls. You get them all the way and they will put sweets/chocolates in between squeezed boobs (he did the motion for us) or even eat the chocolate off her nipple. Sounds very exciting. We opened a new bottle of sochu and it just cost us 7000 yen for the night each. Next time will be cheaper since we have a bottle.

Day 2 - Itano Tomomi is everywhere!!

When I first came to Japan last year, it was mostly the euphoric feeling of yes, I can`t believe I`m actually in Japan! Now since I know what to expect its like the feeling I had when I went back home after my first year in Melbourne. Its like a continuation of my holiday from last year. As if I pressed paused at the end of my trip, had to deal with real life mundane stuff (work) and now I`m just continuing where I left off. Basically the excitement of the first time is no longer there.

I`m a bit concerned about coke that makes you `happy`.

Woke up in the morning around 8 and had a smoke outside watching OLs go to work. Ah, it doesn`t get better than that. Anyway off to Shinjuku for Uniqlo. Kind of lost of way in Shinjuku. I forgot to bring the map for a ramen place we went last year and I couldn`t find my way back. Went past Freshness Burger but couldn`t find my way back to it. While wandering Shinjuku trying to find that ramen place, I think I walked pass 3 Uniqlos. Ended up buying 3 shirts, two gundam and one random shirt for 1500 each. Not a bad price but the quality is a bit thin. They actually had some nice One Piece shirts but I`m not a One Piece fan. Uniqlo should have licensed Berserk or 20th Century Boys instead.

Famous arcway to kabukicho.

During my random walks, I finally ended up at Kubukicho, the real life map for Ryu ga gotoku! No idea how I completely missed it last year! Instead of random yakuza looking for fights, it was random old men trying to sell me dvds. I`m pretty sure they are not selling me hollywood dvds. I wonder if dvds are a code word for something. Unfortunately there`s a huge construction work next to theater square. Is Majima building his Kamuro Hills?Lol. The funny thing is there are an army of hosts in Kubukicho. Even the famous Shichifuku parking lot from the game was covered in host billboards. Didn`t want to take pictures cause wanted to avoid problems. So is kubukicho now the place for lonely Japanese women to go at night? Ended up eating gyudon at yoshinoya.

The very famous Don Quixote store from Ryu ga gotoku/Yakuza.

OMFG its Theature Square! Where`s the freaking phone booth to save my game?

Next stop was Shibuya, or more specifically Shibuya Kaikan, the home arcade of Shiro Abel or who is now known as Shiro Makoto. Had a nice afternoon going from rankless to DDD but I knew that the true competition only comes out in the night. Went back home around 3.30 pm and had a short nap.

At the end of the night, I ended up with a C rank and a 23-19 record.

Woke up 5ish . I had been thinking about getting  a 3DS so off to Yodobashi Akiba. Might as well get it earlier rather than later. Tried out the demo of Biohazard 3DS and well, the 3D didn`t blow me away. You had to keep it at a certain angle for the 3D to work and I found myself having to readjust all the time. So I thought better than didn`t get one. There`s no game that`s really worth getting on 3DS at the moment. The main reason to get one now for me is that flash carts for the NDS work on the 3DS and there are a lot of NDS games I want to play. On the other hand, I`ve got a lot of unplayed games on my PSP so for now, I holding out on the 3DS until LovePlus 3DS comes out. Its currently selling at 25000 yen brand new but I wonder how much second hand ones cost.

The mass of humanity at Shibuya.

Went to Shinjuku and had Burger King for dinner. Before you laugh at me for going all the way to Japan for Burger King, have a look at the burger called Meat Monster!

Its basically a double whopper plus bacon and extra piece of really juicy chicken on top. Not like the dry chicken pieces we get in Melbourne. ALl that it needs is an extra slice of bacon and an egg. Hhmmm.

True enough, the crowd at Shinjuku Kaikan at night was different. Lots of high Bs and A level players. And I got destroyed. Raped. Killed. There was a boxer and dictator that I just couldn`t beat. They just weren`t textbook flowchart. Lots of frame traps in links that I`ve never seen including from a Dee Jay player. There was an incredible Juri player who though was BB+, had an incredible 9 win streak. He had block strings, frame traps and option selects that I couldn`t believe and crazy use of ultra 1. I couldn`t even comprehend a lot of what he was doing and all I learned from the fight was unless you had a DP, don`t push buttons when Juri is doing an attack string in the corner.

I`m sleeping in a box in the wall.

Fought a 250000BP Ken. I thought this was a match up I new very well but instead I played like the noobie that I am. The best way I can describe it is its as if his Ken is freestyle instead of flowchart. His jump in so hard to anti air with Abel because he can either do normal attack jump in or tatsu. Managed to win after 5 tries but I`m pretty sure he let me win as he wanted to leave. Oh yeah, Shinbuya Kaikan is only 50 yen per play, best of three rounds and of course ashtrays everywhere. Nice old school dirty arcade.

I feel like a fucking noob. Lets not mention one A level Cammy. I don`t think Abel has an option select against her dive kicks. I didn`t see Shiro but getting trashed by A and B level players has opened my eyes to how crap I am. I remember fighting a BBB textbook flowchart boxer last year at Big Box and thought I`m not too bad. Yesterday, I saw a BB+ Juri killing people I can`t even beat.

Its still fun to watch them play. Japanese players play SF4 different from other people. It just feels more creative and I saw lots of wacky character specific option select stuff. There was a Ken c.LK, c.HP option select against Blanka`s ex rainbow ball escape on wakeup. Probably the most memorable thing I saw was after Ken`s fadc Ultra 1, lk or mk tatsu to cross over prone body, jump up and kara tatsu. Right now my aim is to get to B level. Let`s see how much SF I can get in the next two weeks plus.

Couldn`t do my blog last night cause people were hogging the pcs. Tried to do on my Galaxy S but Opera and the default web browser couldn`t type in blooger. WTF. Was too tired to wait up and for the first time ever in years, I slept before 1am.

Day 1 - I`m back baby, yeah!

Testing silent camera at Cairns. I can`t believe there`s no option to turn camera silent. I have to download silent camera app and the pictures are worse than the default camera.

The flight to Japan was horribly torturous. The only good thing was there were a lot of Japanese girls at Cairns airport. I think most of the tourists there are Japanese. There was a nice looking gaijin goth loli girl though. She is definitely headed for Harajuku. Next time I need to find a direct flight with no stupid stopover. The plan was only half full which was pretty nice.

Ryu ga gotoku of the End poster in front of Yodobashi. For the fifth time in the series, Haruka gets kidnapped again...

My flight left Melbourne about 6am and I arrived at the backpackers at 9.15pm. The bloody Narita express was delayed because of an `accident`. I was freaking tired but was determined that my first meal in Japan would be Kyushu Jangara Ramen. Put my bags down and back to Akiba I went. Oh yeah, forgot how horrible it is carrying luggage during peak hour train traffic with everyone muscling their way in. On the bright side, there is no way to avoid squishing oneself against females adjacent to you.

Gah, stupid shaky hands. Pretty sure you can make out all the nice juicy pork in the ramen.

After having my only proper meal of the day and I stopped by two kombinis to get soap and shampoo and guess what, they have all sorts of stupid hair products like gatsby and hair colouring but no freaking shampoo. Maybe they did but there were some products that could have been shampoo but I neglected to learn the kanji for it.

The newly renovated Akiba station electric town exit aka 2nd best smoking spot in Akiba. Notice Club Sega on the left side! It had two face to face SSF4AE machines but no card selling machine. gggrrr

My galaxy S gps is worthless. Stupid pieace of Korean tech. First thing tomorrow is to find a supermarket so I can have a proper bath. Tempted to walk into Yodobashi Akiba earlier and get my 3DS but right now I don`t want to add weight because I`ll be doing some travelling. On the other hand, getting a 3DS earlier means I can get more street pass stuff.

Yup, Gundam cafe is still going strong.

One more thing I want to say is I need Rei`s have a camera slung over shoulder and take ninja shot skills. The pretend to play phone while taking photo of cute girl is too difficult to do because you basically have to point your camera higher. I wish I could show the people who decided not to go what they`re missing out but I would need a pair of glasses that can take pictures by mind control. I guess the best way to see how hot girls are in Japan is to come here yourself.

Off to Japan again!

In a few hours, I will be on a plane to Japan or rather off to Cairns for a bloody 2 hour stop before going on a very long flight to Tokyo. This will be a trip one year in the making. I knew that I had to go back to Japan after last year's awesome trip. Unfortunately, this year I am going by myself which sort of ended up as a good thing as I had to change my flight twice to accommodate certain events.

The good thing about budget airlines is that if you check every so often, you can find cheap prices. The bad thing is that it costs money to change your flight and you end up having to pay the full fare. Needless to say, I could have gone for a regular airline with the price I am paying.

Oh well, sacrifices must be made. As no one is going with me, I've had to plan stuff to do in Japan. There's no fallback activity of yakiniku and drinking, unless I want to do the KDO solo yakiniku. It would be waste of time to end up playing my PSP in a small room when I can do that back home.

My Japanese has certainly improve from last year. I can play the AKB48 game on PSP and understand most of it but its not at a level that it could have been, especially conversation-wise. Just too lazy to hit the books on Japanese grammar. Learning to read by playing Japanese games has not taught me how to talk.

Since I don't have an official photographer and navigator this time, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S for this trip only to find out the GPS on the damn phone is FUBAR. I would have expected all the reviews that I read and watched would have stressed this point. Goes to show that most smartphone reviews are about specs and not putting a phone through its paces.

Very excited about this trip. Tried to sleep after work today but failed. The past year has been all about this holiday. I'm not really a picture taking person. 99% of my pics from the last trip were from Hellcar and Rei but we'll see how I go this time. I think without anyone to talk to I'll probably be doing a lot of blogging. I wonder whether I'll still get this strong feeling of I should have gone to Japan to study/ I should go teach English in Japan if only I've got some place to dump all my worldly possessions.

Jdorama ramblings 24/5/11

JIN eps 3-5

Come one Jin sensei, flimsy partitions are meant to be broken down!

We've got the conclusion of the Jin gets framed and sent to Guantanamo.. I mean prison. All the prison stuff is actually the same as the stories in Lone Wolf and Cub which was very fun for me. Sadly, episode 3 marks the writing out of Nokaze from the series which is sad. Jin finally proposes to Saki and she rejects him because he might disappear someday and she wants to devote her life to Jinyu-do. Without Nokaze, the writer has to resort to something else to keep them apart and its not as interesting.

Noooo, how can Nokaze marry a gaijin!!!!!


Ep 5 is more like a discourse about Jin sensei's purpose. In the beginning of the series is was about whether he should interfere with history. Now its about whether anything he does makes a difference because he is starting to think that he cannot change the hand of fate, ie save the lives of people who are supposed to die and is merely delaying their time of death. There's this father sun kabuki story arguing that quality of life is more important than length but this episode just really feels contrived and boring.

Will Ryoma save the series?

Is Jin the series finally losing its way? What is the heart of the series? Its no longer the Nokaze-Jin-Saki triangle. It feels like its less about Jin trying to be MacGuyer of surgeons. Perhaps that part of the series has run its course? Ep 5 just feels like a lame generic made for tv sob story. It seems like episode 6 will get back to the story that we have all been waiting for; can Jin actually save Sakamoto Ryoma. And who is the bandaged guy talking to? Seems to me like ep 5 is a mere abberation.

BARTENDER ep 1

After watching Shinya Shokudo, bartender feels 25 minutes too long. I've heard that the anime is pretty good and to me this type of stories should have a running time of 25 minutes. At 45~50 minutes, the first episode took too long and had to rely on too much fillers.

GOOD LIFE ep 1

WTF GTO would never carry a handbag!

When your dorama about a fatal disease kid has a lot of narration by the character who's only purpose is to make all the ladies go kawaii~~~~ then you know you're in for a shallow attempt at a tearjerker which actually works well as a sleep inducer. Come GTO, get Nojima Shinji or Ozaki Masaya to write you a dorama to star in or do a WOWOW dorama.

MAMORU NO OKITE ep 1

Aaww, how cute... not.

I like Abe Sadao and I want to see what else he can do but not a bloody kids show. Actually I don't mind the whole I am going to ruin my life taking responsibility for my high school sempai's kids because I can never understand the huge importance Japanese place on high school sports when one can continue to play sports even when working. If you like team camaraderie so much, why not continue playing?

Kids, I was much cooler when I had blonde hair and was always drunk or half sedated.

Its got the little girl from Mother but this show tries so bloody hard to be kawaii it sickens me. The talking dog is not Shikaotoko funny. Its bloody kids show funny. Someone explain to me why a kids show has a 9pm slot. Shouldn't they be in bed by then?

Akutou eps 7 aka Why I should be the Japanese minister of common sense.

The more I watch jdoramas, especially police shows, the more it seems like writers/action directors just lack common sense. Lets take a look at this action scene at the end of ep 7 of Akutou.

Scowling yakuza guys wearing black and driving black cars arrive at, where else but an abandoned warehouse!

Cops decide to drive into warehouse but not before magically turning the lights off. Note only 1 cop is smart enough to brandish a gun and use his teammates for cover. From years of watching cop shows, one would think the proper procedure would be to open car doors and use them as shields while telling yakuza to put down their weapons but maybe posing as a team is more important in Japanese police protocol.

Here we see at least two yakuza with guns and a most of them holding melee weapons. Unless my name were Rambo, I would be pretty scared without a gun and cover.

Togashi just walks up, purposely misses 4 shots and non of the dudes with guns fire back! You are a badass yakuza with a gun and some mofo is shooting at you and your run away in terror like a little girl? This just boggles my mind! The only explanation is that Togashi somehow knew the yakuza were carrying toy guns.

Togashi finally corners the boss and the boss as fired on him a few times. Guess what this grizzled veteran police officer does? Walks straight up to the yakuza boss with a kiai...

..while the boss somehow misses his last shot. I was hoping Togashi got shot to teach him a lesson about stupidity. The Prime Minister of Japan must hire me as Minister of common sense in order to avoid such affronts to logic.

Kodama Kiyoshi has passsed away.

That face look familiar? If you are a jdorama fan, you must have seen him at least twice, usually playing the calm old dude role. I was looking at his wiki and I was surprised that he has been in so little doramas in the past 10 years compared to someone like Kita Yoshio who is in everything. From what I can gather from his Japanese wiki, he is most famous for hosting this quiz show called Attack 25 which started in 1975. He did a crazy amount of movies in the 60s though.

While I've only seen Kodama Kiyoshi as a supporting actor, there are two shows that I will always remember him in. The first is Bijo ka Yajuu/Beauty of Beast where he plays this veteran newscaster that Matsushima Nanako wants to oust. His claim to fame is his legendary report on a bank robbery years ago which was finally revealed in a climatic payoff. One of the most memorable side stories in jdoramas I've seen.

His second memorable role was in Shikaotoko and I don't want to spoil the surprise but it was really fun watching him play something different from his usual character. RIP Kodama Kiyoshi and its a shame your last show had to be Code Blue 2. If you haven't seen the above mentioned doramas, I encourage you to do so because they are bloody good.

Jmovie review: Rinko 18

WARNING: The following review has screencaps containing nudity so there's no reason not to scroll down!

Notice the naked chick pressing against the van window, filming an AV.

Its been very slow on the jdorama front. The subs for show that I like are either very slow or have stopped halfway. The only thing for me to watch this season is Jin and shockingly I don't think anyone's uploaded Kazoku Hotei. I've got a huge backlog of J and K movies but I don't even know where to start.

Thank goodness for strategically placed cameras.

So I have recently been going to my third choice which is Pinku. If you've never heard of Pinku, its basically Japanese softcore movies. Think JAV with more story, simulated sex and the same amount of budget. Its like watching midnight doramas except the story is usually over in an hour. Funny thing is, a lot of Pinku are English hardsubbed. Not too sure whether Rinko 18 can be classified as Pinku since its more like a super low budget comedy with nudity, especially with the main actress not taking her clothes off.

The poster in the middle for Nanaumi Nana. Her last name is written as kanji as 7 seas. Don't ask me how I knows.

We've seen doramas and movies about almost every occupation in Japan from hostesses to telemarketing sales people. One industry that I have yet to see a story about is the AV industry. Many years ago, I remember watching this HK movie about the porn industry. I remember it had fun stuff like assistants rocking the bed during filming and this porn actor whose wife and child visited the set. There are lot of of interesting stories to be told about ordinary people working in porn.

Rinko being seeing for the first time what AV is about.

Rinko 18, which is apparently based on a manga is a less realistic but fun romp about an ojousan schoolgirl, Rinko who's parents ran away because of bad debts. She returns home to find everything gone and the house besieged by debt collectors. She ends up sleeping in a park and realises that she has to find work to survive. Rinko has no luck finding work until she find a job ad for an AV company.

She is of course mistaken for an actress and in a told to stand on top of an actor and piss on him to her horror. Luckily for her, the real actress turns up. The boss offers Rinko to live in the office the use of the costumes since Rinko's clothes are gone. What follows are funny scenes of this ojousan learning tricks of the JAV trade such as how to make fake semen using egg whites.

Funny scene with Rinko teaching the actress how to use a less rambo (violent) technique.

We have the final story of Rinko befriending the no.1 AV actress and we have an attempted rape scene. What Rinko 18 has going for it is the novelty of a movie about shooting AV. The storyline elements are pretty bad including the cliched ojousan learning to ride bicycle bit. Its not in the so bad its good category but I had plenty of laughs watching it. Rinko 18 is not subbed but most of it is easily understandable except for one sequence about keeping quiet during shooting.

He certainly puts a lot of effort into mixing the lotion.

Notice the shachou trying out the S&M device at the back, lol.

Rinko giving the actor the fake semen squirting device.

I want to run my own JAV production company when I grow up. :)