Today the people I'm staying with went to Yokohama to meet with some old people watercolor club of some sort. I went with them because I've never been to Yokohama. We got up early and took the train there. Got there, and I bowed with all the people in their group, and then we walked up to some park with a statue of Ii Naosuke where they were all ( Read more... )

Okay here's what happened. I got to Tokyo yesterday evening. I got frickin' hell in customs. Okay, I guess it could've been worse. They didn't strip search me. But the first customs agent was all "wtf" over my big stack of CD-R's. He asked me what was on them and I said "anime and music mostly." Then he went and got his supervisor and his ( Read more... )

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The other day was 火祭り　(fire festival). I'm not certain what the origins of this one are, but what I do know is that it involves a bunch of guys building a big bonfire, and then running around in diapers while hitting each other with flaming torches. Looks juvenile, but fun. I only know about it what I saw on the nightly news ( Read more... )

Today I went to Nagoya as I had been planning to do, in order to find the store where I intend to go to buy Xenosaga on Thursday. It turned out to be the best frickin' day of my life. Okay, that's probably an exaggeration, but I must say that my entire trip to Japan has been leading up to this, as I have found heaven on earth. Basically what ( Read more... )

Oh yeah, manga artists: Japan is your heaven. Even at populist, non-specialized department stores you can find more and better and cheaper manga-supplies than you'd be able to after 48 straight hours of searching in the US. It's so cool. Especially all the screens they have available. And the markers. And really cheap but high quality sketch ( Read more... )

Speaking of squant...I wish they had magical squant-colored garbage bags that I could just throw anything in. I mean, my whole kitchen is cluttered with garbage bags because I have to have 5 different bags for different kinds of trash. It's irritating ( Read more... )

God I hate that "Ooh, I have 5 new emails...aaaand, they're all spam -_- True it's an odd time of day right now in the western world so I didn't expect to have much email at the time. But send me more email anyways, about anything, just to give me something to do ( Read more... )

I was just at the book store, and I saw that they had the new Love Hina vol 14. I tried to resist looking at it, but I obviously didn't resist very well because within 5 seconds it was in my hand. The first thing I noticed on the cover was lots of cherry blossoms. Then I noticed that all or most of the characters were on it. Up in front I saw ( Read more... )

Well today was kinda good I guess. Although I've been a bad boy. I guess it'll be nothing but rice for me for the next week to make up for it money-wise. It all started a few days ago when I was at a book store and there was this really sweet poster advertising the limited edition version of vol. 7 of the Evangelion manga. It shows Shinji, ( Read more... )