So I bought this Manga the other day because the cover was really cool, but I have no idea what it is or what it's called. It seems to be some sort of horror comic about butterflies that eat people.
Since I know that I now have some Japanese readers (Maho m( )m) I thought I'd ask here what the Manga is actually called.
Since a couple of weeks back Emma and I have been using PASMO. Here is the definition according to a subway station guide.
PASMO card is a convenient prepaid transportation card that contains an integrated-circuit (IC) chip, allowing the user to enter the subway by simply swiping the card over a PASMO reader located on the ticket gates. The card is rechargeable and can be used over and over. It also can be used interchangeably with the East Japan Railsway Co.'s (JR) Suica card. In addition to using your charged PASMO card to ride the subway or bus system, you can use it to pay for items purchased at stores and vending machines. The PASMO card can also be used for purchases wherever you see the Suica logo.
So this is why I really love PASMO! You just beep the card at the ticket gates in the subway when you enter and when you leave and it deducts the correct amount from your card.
You buy the card from a vending machine and there are basically two versions of the card, one that is connected to you personally and one that is not - so everyone can use it freely. If you choose to personal card you have to provide a passport when buying it, the advantage of this being that if you loose your card you can reclaim it with the amount that was left on it.
So here we've got a card that you can use to pay for stuff really fast, it literally takes milliseconds for the purchase to go through, and a lot of convenience stores like AMPM takes PASMO, so it can actually be used as a replacement for cash.
I like credit cards and I don't like carrying around lots of cash in my pocket. But there is a very large downside to credit cards, if someone gets a hold of your card they have full access to your entire bank account until you have time to block it, which if you don't notice that it's gone or if your robbed and they steal your phone too, can be a pretty long time.
With PASMO you only keep it charged with a reasonably small amount at any given time, the maximum amount allowed to store on it is (I think) 30 000 yen. So if it's stolen or you loose it, you can't loose very much, just like cash. If you have the personal card you still have the option to block it as well. So you've now eliminated one downside to using a credit card.
The second big downside to using credit cards is time, you have to take out your card, swipe it (and hope the magnetic strip isn't wiped, something that happens quite often) and then wait for confirmation. Every store has to be online to check that the card is valid and all that. All of this takes huge amounts of time, and banks usually charge the store a small amount for each card-purchase they handle (at least in Sweden).
With PASMO, you simply keep the card in your wallet and put it up against an IC-reader and radio frequencies does the rest. Everything is over and handled in milliseconds, because the IC on the card keeps track of how much money is on there (I assume). I don't know how hard it is to hack, but I assume here as well that it's pretty damn hard because if people were doing it, they probably wouldn't have the card. The reason I don't think they store the charged amount in a central database is that it would require every vending machine in every street to be online and that seems unlikely.
So, PASMO is the perfect blend of the safety of cash with even greater ease of use than a credit card. It's simply fucking awesome.
I'm quite pleased with the selection of alcoholic drinks in Japan, their beer is really good and they have everything you would have at home.
The kind of drinking I'm not satisfied with in Japan is the kind of "stopping at a vending machine to get a drink when your thirsty" or "getting some nice soda to go with your food" drinking.
Japan doesn't have Sprite, at all, and Sprite is totally my favorite soda. They have Coke but they use some other kind of sweetener here so it tastes like crap to be honest. So during my visit here I've been hunting for a Sprite replacement, someone must have thought of the idea to bring Sprite to Japan.
The closest I've gotten so far is this:
It was sprite with some lemony (or something) twist, pretty OK, but quite hard to find.
The most disgusting thing I've come across, that basically just tasted like dishwashing liquid was this:
Japanese people have a strange sense of taste :P What I find most disturbing is their various Jelly drinks, like these:
The first one - the energy drink equivalent to one riceball tastes just lemon, but had a very strange and not good aftertaste of.. well, rice! The jelly fanta tasted very good, but it feels just like drinking old milk that is so old that it has started to form lumps in it.
What I do like about the japanese assortment of drinks is this:
They have a huge selection of vitamin water, vitamin drinks, protein water, mineral water and kinds of shizzle like that. It's pretty awesome, especially when I have a cold like this.
Another quick food/drink related notes:
I didn't know Coca Cola made bottled water, but apparently they do, and in a couple of other countries. I LOHAS is usually the cheapest water you can buy too! I suppose that's another good think about the selection, water is always available, but sometimes you want something with taste.
And while I'm whining, this is something that really bothers me:
They individually wrap everything here, this is a single piece of gum from a well-packaged packet of gum. The cheese we buy, every single slice is individually wrapped with plastic. Japan seems very environmentally friendly and you see commercials everywhere with how "green" everything is and they sort all their garbage very carefully, to see that they waste so much packaging material is just weird.
The first cold from the start of the trip lingered for like 2 weeks before it finally gave in. So I've been cold-free now for like a week or something, absolutely wonderful, especially as the rainy season is over and we're getting some sun, it really feels like summer now!
But, unfortunately, I've caught another cold somehow, with the same symptoms. Starting out yesterday with a soar throat, that today has escalated into a very soar throat and tomorrow it will probably go over into a runny nose.
It's only this soar throat part that bothers me, it makes it painful to talk and to eat and to just exist. A runny nose I can control, I can have some paper with me and I don't feel at all sick, it's this part that really sucks and I hope it goes away soon. Emma doesn't seem to have caught it and I'm hoping I won't give it to her.
So we recently finished our Asian poses as suggested by Emanuel. Here is the finished (as of pose #28) result:
When we were done we sent them in to the guy who manages asianposes.com to accept his "challenge" in where he challenges people to do these poses and take pictures.
We quite promptly got featured on the page and is currently the top post! You can find the post on asianposes.com here. This was a super fun thing to do so thanks to Emanuel for suggesting it! It's also totally super awesome to be featured on the asianposes.com page! :D
If you want to see full resolution images of all the poses they can be found here.
As previously stated, I really want to learn Japanese. To this end i bought a japanese dictionary/translator. It does work very well and I have managed to use it some, but it has pros and cons like everything in life.
The translator itself is very handy, as you can see it has one big screen, which is also a touch screen for easy navigation and selection. The bottom screen is where you write in Kanji to have the translator recognize it. The first catch with this is that it is stroke-sensitive, by which i mean it senses in which direction a stroke is made and in which order they are made. This is then used to select a Kanji, rather than just matching exact looks. The pro with this is that when you actually know the rules for drawing Kanji you don't have to draw them prettily to make it recognize them. After you've drawn one and it selects it wrong, you can bring up options to which the character drawn might be as well. Usually I find the correct character in the alternatives.
Here it is with some scale, a manga book under it and my hand for reference, as well as my moleskine.
As you can see it's not very big, but big enough to make the buttons and such easy to use. It weighs very little so it's easy to bring along.
One thing I've found in trying to use this is not that all the menus are in Japanese, you get around that pretty quick by using the short English quick-use manual. The biggest problem for me right now is that it's dictionary and word-translator. Which I of course knew and wanted, but this means when trying to translate for instance the manga, I have to translate character by character without context, making it somewhat difficult to put together into a sentence. I however wanted this to be able to learn words and kanji by themselves, the problem comes from me not knowing enough theory to put it together correctly.
As I said before, the menus are in Japanese and the English manual is short so there is a lot I don't know about this thing yet.
There is space for microSD, a USB plug for connecting to the computer and headphones - mainly for playing the 70 000 words a native speaker has recorded into the thing. I don't know what to do with either the SD or the USB.
Therefore, the device is more useful the more Japanese you know.
As you can see, I've already pimped it with a cube :P
Learning Japanese does sometimes seem like an insurmountable task, thousands upon thousands of words to learn and thousands upon thousands of characters to learn. All without coming into natural daily contact with it. I think while living here I could learn to speak the language probably within 6 months, but at home, the only contact I would have with the language outside of myself trying to learn it - would be if I watched anime, which I unfortunately don't do very much because I can't seem to find really good ones. I really doubt there are people subtitling normal Japanese TV-shows and putting them online as well, which makes natural contact all the more difficult.
I'm planning on trying to schedule like and hour a day for learning, but it requires huge amounts of discipline. Discipline I don't actually believe I have, school easily takes a hold of your life and it's extremely easy and convenient to claim "I don't have time".
On the other hand, it would kick ass to be able to speak three languages, and to have the third one be Japanese would just be beyond awesome.
Igår var vi i Yokohama under dagen, staden precis bredvid Tokyo.
Jag har egentligen inte så mycket att säga om det mer än att det är en väldigt mysig stad, och det känns som att det är ett sånt ställe som Tokyo-bor åker till när de skall skaffa familj men ändå vill vara nära Tokyo. Staden ser väldigt fin ut och är väldigt fräsh. Den totalförstördes tydligen totalt under jordbävningen 1923 och sen drabbades den kraftigt av brandbombningar under andra världskriget, så staden är i princip 50 år gammal. Till skillnad från t.ex. Hiroshima har de lyckats bygga upp det som en ny fräsh stad och inte försökt återuppbygga gammal kultur.
I really love Japan, and I love a really good club. But I'm having a hard time making the two mix. Granted my experience of Japans club life is that of a "tourist" and I haven't had a chance to thoroughly investigate it, but by my experience so far, Japanese people don't like to dance.
The few clubs we've been to here have all played only western music. No japanese hip-hop, no japanese pop, no japanese nothing. The clubs in themselves are actually very good, they pay attention to detail in decorating, the sound systems are good, the lighting is good. The DJs are much better than in Sweden. Take this clip from Club Atom in Shibuya as example.
You couldn't get that kind of music in southern Sweden at all.
What bugs me about the club life here though is that they add chairs and tables everywhere, making the dance floor as small as possible. Japanese people (I think) are used to bars and pubs, those are everywhere, they have a lot of bars and pubs. But they're not used to dancing and partying in a western way, they're not used to a dance floor. So to sort of mix the idea of a club and a bar, they put chairs and tables everywhere inside the club. Don't get me wrong, a nice club has places to sit and rest for 5-10 minutes, but you don't go to a club to sit down. I say that Japanese club life is in it's infancy because I think the whole concept is rather new to Japan. I think they need to start playing some Japanese music and ditch the chairs to make people dance! This video is from the club we went to last night. Club Muse, it was a really cool place and super nice, the bottom floor played the kind of music you hear the first 10 seconds, the last 20 seconds are what made it kind of weird, they had a lot of that stuff and sort of 90s music and several years old American hip hop.Another thing about clubs here are that they are pretty hard to find and have sort of anonymous entrances. This was the entrance to Muse:
Det finns många twists and turns i Japansk matkultur. Man kan knappast anklaga dem för att ha bra bordskick, om det är något de är bra på så är det att sörpla. Två andra saker som de utövar väldigt kraftigt är att äta mycket och att äta snabbt!
Som jag nämnde i det förra inlägget om mat så är portionerna man får på de flesta ställena extremt stora, i början av resan klarade jag bara av att äta upp hälften.
Men nu på senare tid har jag lyckats rensa mina tallrikar!
Något jag behöver säga är dock att Japansk mat faktiskt sällan ser bra ut. Något de aldrig riktigt lärt sig är att presentera maten på ett tilltalande sätt. Maten smakar nästan alltid bra, men vissa saker ser bara rent av motbjudande ut. Jag provade nyss en rätt som i princip bara bestod av kött, ris, lök och någon sås. Den smakade väldigt bra men problemet med den, och anledningen till att jag aldrig ätit den innan, är att den ser för jävlig ut. De lägger allt kött på toppen, så allting ser ut som en stor dallrande grå kötthög. När man väl får det och rör runt det lite med riset blir det dock ganska bra direkt.
Hastigheten har jag dock inte lyckats matcha japanerna än. Vissa kommer in och äter upp en sån där skål med nudlar, inkl soppan och allt på 10-15 minuter. Det är helt sinnessjukt, speciellt med tanke på att jag inte kan äta den alls i början för att den är så varm.
Vi kan dock se här att jag spöar Emma i hastighet i alla fall! Att äta snabbt är dock inget jag planerar att träna på, jag tror det är mer hälsosamt att inte slänga i sig allt direkt.
Eftersom vi festade igår kom vi upp ganska sent idag, därför passade vi på att ta en lite lugn dag. Det passade bra att åka till Odaiba igen eftersom Gundam hade sin grand-opening igår!
Han var riktigt mäktig nu när han var klar och alla lampor igång och sånt!
För er som missat det är det en 18 meter hög exoskeletal fighting machine som de byggt i Tokyos hamn. Den är riktigt fetinggrym alltså!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amu6G7ZfFUY]
Efter vi hade spanat in honom ett tag stannade vi i hamnen och satt nere vid vattnet ett tag. Jag älskar Odaiba, det är ett skitskönt område, man ser stan och har naturen och vattnet och allting framför sig. Samtidigt har jag lite emot det eftersom det är ganska turistigt, men om man håller sig borta från köpcentret som vi gjorde idag märker man inte av det alls.
Bron här på bilden heter Rainbow Bridge och man förstår nästan varför, det är riktigt vackert upplyst och det brukar ligga ganska mycket båtar med färgglad belysning framför den.
Efter vi hade suttit nere vid vattnet ett tag gick vi och satte oss och tog en öl i en bar som låg precis vid stranden.
Där vi hade denna utsikten:
Efter vi hade suttit här och filosoferat och njutit av livet ett tag...
...så åkte vi hem igen.
Väl hemma så gick vi inom vår lokala supermarket och skulle handla något litet att äta för kvällen och upptäckte en CD spelare som stod och spelade en melodi. Denna snutten (ca 30 sekunder lång) som CD spelaren spelar har den spelat i en konstant loop som hållt på i åtminstone 2 år då jag mycket väl kommer ihåg den från förra resan. Stackars människor som jobbar där...
I övrigt har jag köpt översättaren som jag ville ha! Jag ska lägga upp någon bild på den sen när jag får det. Jag fick lite sponsringspengar så nu klarade jag av att köpa den och fortfarande ha en liten buffert för att handla om det dyker upp något häftigt under den sista tiden här. Den fungerar bra men alla menyer är på Japanska, det finns en engelsk manual men den var bara 2 sidor och gick igenom absolut grundläggande funktionalitet. Det innebär alltså att jag håller på att försöka lära mig den hyffsat. Har påbörjat mitt projekt med att översätta en manga som heter Bakuman.
