Welcome to Sophelia's Japan

A blog about adventures, academia, adoption and other things starting with the letter 'A'.
I'm a geek, a metal head, a shiba inu wrangler and a vegetarian, and I write about all of the above. You have been warned!

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Showing posts with label drama/anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama/anime. Show all posts

Tuesday, 28 July 2015

Rebound

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Life is crazy and the blog is suffering, so I'm sharing something I wrote to friends last year that isn't really up to blogging standard but I hope may be slightly entertaining. I used made-up names for friends who would find it easier, but you can read a proper blurb over at Stella Lee, from whence I stole this lovely photo:
 
Too sick (morning sickness will apparently never end) to do anything except watch TV, but out of good shows so I tried picking a random show from hulu and watched a very problematic Japanese comedy about an obese girl who loses weight to work at a fashion magazine, is sent off to write cake reviews and subsequently gets force fed cake by a violent patissiere she falls in love with but who causes her to regain all her weight and then says he won’t date “fat chicks“. Do I watch episode 2 in morbid curiosity or try to erase it from my memory?!

OK, I have braved the disturbing world of "Rebound" and am ready to share the exciting events of episodes 2-5.

At the end of episode 1 Prince had declared his love for Piglet, who had "rebounded" to obesity (a fat suit) as a result of his cakes, but tells her he can't date "fat chicks". She's already at the shop when he says that and before she can leave he sees her and, not recognizing her, assumes she is his new part time employee. She plays along, calling herself Choko. She was also fired from her job at the fashion magazine for gaining weight.

In episode 2 Piglet tells Prince that she needs a couple of weeks before she can meet him, and tells him to make her a new cake in the meantime. He suspects that she is playing him and turns to "Choko" for advice. During this period Piglet meets up with an old boyfriend who seems to get off on jiggling her fat. I shall call him Feeder. Her employer also tells her that if she can lose the weight in two weeks she can have her job back. She admits herself to a weight-loss clinic and undergoes various painful looking procedures before getting back down to 40-somthing kilos. In the meantime Prince is desperately drowning his insecurities in cake. At the end of the episode Piglet calls him to say they can meet and he has a delicious cake delivered to her, but it turns out that now he has become obese.

Episode 3 is largely Piglet trying to deal with the fact that she doesn't want to date Prince now that he's fat. In this episode we learn that he was obese as a child and his unhappy memories are why he wont date fat women, so his comments in eps 1 and 2 are totally justified while "women only care about appearance" and are shallow. He starts calling "Choko" and suggests they should date instead since they are both fat. At the same time Feeder ends up working liaison with Piglet's company. He tells her he always liked her the way she was and suggests they date again. Just as she seems tempted, Prince has another new cake delivered to her, and realizing that even though the only thing she liked about him was his looks she actually also really likes his cakes, so she goes running to him... and he has also lost weight. Now they are both skinny they can finally shag, so they run off to a hotel. However, both get up in the night to down diet pills.

Episode 4 starts out with them waking in the hotel then going to the gym together where they commiserate about to horrors of growing up fat while obsessively exercising. Their excessive lovie-dovieness quickly begins to tire them both and they both keep chugging down diet pills despite warnings of dangerous side-effects. Still feeling insecure Prince tries to rush into marriage but Piglet gets cold feet when she realises he expects her to quit her job right as she is offered a promotion of sorts in the form of a company trip to Paris. He makes her a giant pink wedding cake but she says that isn't the cake she wants, she wants a "I'll support your career" cake. He then gets depressed and wallows around in the wedding cake and she feels bad, so she quits her job and hands back the plane ticket. Not knowing this, Prince shows up and with a "I actually totally support your career" cake and takes her to the airport, telling her to have fun in Paris but not to gain weight or he'll dump her.

Episode 5 Not able to actually go to Paris or afford a hotel, Piglet is offered a place to stay by Feeder, who knows the whole story. He takes her to a hotel, orders a bunch of room service and threatens to tell Prince everything unless she eats it. As they scuffle her diet pills all end up in the toilet. He then takes her to her old company to try and get her job back. As they wait to speak to her old boss, a fashion designer who had announced a partnership with the magazine says he will cancel their contract unless the magazine staff eat 200 cakes. They can't manage it and Piglet steps in, eating all the cakes, saving the day and getting her job back. She once again "rebounds" and confesses everything to Prince who says he is sick of her lies and tells her not to come back.


How will it end? Well, I did watch the whole thing but it turned into a pretty ordinary love triangle then "oh no, filial obligation or love?" drama after episode 5 and got kind of dull to write up, so you'll just have to watch it yourselves. It is worth holding on for the end though... they make a deep-fried pork cake. For realsies.
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Thursday, 28 May 2015

Murderers Just Don't Say Good Morning

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A man in Osaka murdered his neighbor this morning, killing her in front of her one year old son. The media pack which assembled immediately began interviewing the other residents of the apartment building about the nature of the murderer~ "I hear he didn't give set greetings (aisatsu)," a reporter asked, "is that so?" "Yes!" The neighbor replied. "He never returned greetings."

In 2005 I was having dinner with a professor of law who taught at a prestigious university. He was telling me about a case with a particularly violent offender. During interviews with the man's family it turned out that his mother had never said "welcome home" (okaeri). "No wonder he became a criminal" my acquaintance exclaimed vehemently, "he never learned the most basic thing about living in society!"

In 2011 I was teaching at a junior high school in a low socio-economic status area with a number of pretty troubled students. There was violence, teen pregnancy, kids cracking open beers on the front steps of the school, that sort of thing. The principal made a speech to the assembled student body about how if they just worked on their greetings, their lives would change for the better.

These experiences are why, when I started watching the TV drama "あいしてる” and a kid came home from school without saying "I'm home" (tadaima) I knew he was going to get into serious trouble. Sure enough, episode two and he'd smashed another kid's head in.

Aisatsu, guys. Don't mess with the greetings.
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Sunday, 28 July 2013

Japanese Drama... Gray's Anatomy Inspired?

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  Recognize who is who? (Image Source Here)

OK, Resident: Story of Five Interns is very heavily Grey's Anatomy inspired. One would almost be tempted to say that it is a Japanised version. Resident has been out for a while now and it has been gradually moving further away from Gray's, but the first few episodes had some very familiar elements. I'm not bagging the show out by noting the similarities to Gray's by the way, I find inter-cultural re-makes fascinating.

Resident tells the story of five young doctors starting their surgical internship. The main character is trying to prove that she can make it as a doctor to her overbearing father, who is a successful doctor. She works with a tall and model-looking female resident (who uses a pink stethoscope), a severe but talented female resident, a fluffy-haired and accident prone male intern whose adoration she is oblivious to, and another male intern who is an abrasive and seemingly self-absorbed womanizer with hidden depths. The romantic interest is a divorced senior doctor with awe-inspiring hair. Early cases in the hospital include a patient who is swallowing magnets due to family problems and a teen-aged girl making herself ill trying to please her perfectionist and never satisfied mother. There's even an emergency in a stalled elevator.

Despite these similarities, there are some huge differences necessitated by the dissimilarity of the Japanese medical system and Japanese television's much more conservative attitude towards sex. One of the pleasures of watching inter-cultural interpretations is seeing what has been changed and what hasn't (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, is fascinating in this regard). Although it has developed into much more soap-opera and less medical-drama, Grey's still places medicine and ethical conundrums pretty firmly in the center of each episode, while Resident is all about the emotional connections between the interns and the patients. There's little discussion of medicine and not many scenes featuring surgeries. The biggest thing that jumped out at me is the simplistic attitude to metal illness and emotional problems in the show. In one episode a man who has been allowing his wife to gradually kill him rather than confront her illness has his situation resolved by the residents handing him a pamphlet on mental illness. After being willing to die rather than confront his wife's situation, it seemed less than probable that he would come around so easily. I guess it was a good pamphlet. Then there was the teenaged girl who was repeatedly attempting suicide. All it took to "fix" her was a trip to the OR to see a dead car-crash victim's family crying. Problem solved. And the girl with the overbearing mother? The residents just told her mother to be nicer to her, and she felt bad for being mean and all was well.

Here are the opening sequences to Gray's and Resident in one video, for your enjoyment.


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Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Sparkling into the High School Baseball Nationals

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High school baseball in Japan dramatic slide to base
It's so much more exciting than pro-games; the kids hold nothing back and literally go for broke(n fingers)
(photo source)
It’s high school baseball season. Unless you have been in Japan at this time of year it is a little hard to describe how important high school baseball is. A friend commented last night that the first time he came to Japan it was during 甲子園 (koshien), the nationals, and he thought a natural disaster had occurred because everyone in the airport was crowded around the televisions watching in rapt silence. Did I forget to mention that it’s televised on the national broadcaster? Restaurants bring out TVs so no one misses the score during lunch. I’ve been asked to cut a teaching seminar short because teachers couldn’t be expected to miss a game. There are magazines dedicated to profiling the players (yes, we are still talking about high school kids here) and team strategies. Some kids are recruited directly into pro teams from the tournament, making it something like college sports in the US I guess. Basically, every boy who plays baseball dreams of making it to koshien. Boys who make it take back sand from the field and treasure it forever. In the TV drama I wrote about in relation to non-biological families, the protagonists’ motivation to foster his dead friend’s children comes not from their (apparently distant) adult relationship but from memories of going to koshien together in high school. It’s that important. In fact, it seems a little sad that for the kids who make it, that’s probably the peak of their lives at the grand old age of around 17. What else is going to compare with that?
Accepting the responsibility of representing the prefecture (photo source)
So this brings me to the reason for today’s post. Yesterday, in a thrilling match (I saw this as someone with no interest in sports and the very Australian habit of referring to the pitcher as the bowler), my husband’s school won the right to play at koshien this year. The school hasn’t made it there since 1997. I hope my introductory paragraph has sufficiently backgrounded you on what a big f-ing deal this is. Obviously I am happy that his kids did well, but there’s more to it than that; some of his kids used to be my kids. I teach K-9, meaning that I have the privilege of teaching kids across their transitions between kindergarten and elementary, and elementary to junior high. Then, some kids graduate and head off to the school my husband teaches at. He has students now that I taught in elementary. It’s beyond words how lucky I am to be able to see them grow up across such a broad time period. So the baseball team’s win yesterday was pretty emotional for me, too. One boy in particular I had in JHS has always had as his dream going to koshien. I never took it that seriously, because like I said, all baseball boys dream of that. But yesterday I got to see him, now more of a man than the boy I taught, making his dream come true. That is pure magic. I’ve done my fair share of bitching and moaning about my job, but there is nothing in the world that could replace the joy I have been able to experience working with these kids. 
This kid is going to be a pro sooner rather than later (photo source)
I’m sorry for the horrible quality (filming my projector with one hand while furiously texting all the other ALTs with the other) but here’s a taste of the final moments. One of the boys on the winning team has a younger brother on the losing team, I think you can probably spot them in this video.

Not only parents but the entire school comes out to watch and cheer for these matches. The kids have synchronised cheers they do non-stop for hours in the sun, as do the parents. The school band plays a different theme-song for each player, and during the “chorus” all the kids chant the player’s name. This isn’t just for home-games; the ENTIRE SCHOOL will travel to Hyogo prefecture for the finals. It’s phenomenal. Personally everything I know about baseball comes from the drama Rookies (excerpt below). Every episode the teacher/coach tells the kids to キラキラ into tomorrow. The translation used in the except I uploaded is “shine”, which is probably more natural in this situation, but when we watched the show the man and I enjoyed translating it as “sparkle”, which is the more common meaning. Hence the title of this blog post. Rookies is well worth a watch for the high melodrama, but also for Hayato Ichihara, who I find strangely attractive.


Sparkle into tomorrow kids!  Make it count!
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Saturday, 6 July 2013

Dazzling Brightness and High Velocity

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[Sponsored Post]



Close up of a green eye after crying or sun exposure
Ouch

The first sunny day I donned my hat and went out to the playground with my students, I had to beat a hasty retreat to the staffroom with tears streaming from my eyes. The intense glare reflecting off the pale packed dirt rendered my hat completely useless as far as eye protection goes. For the next few years I caused much amusement among my kids by religiously wearing sunglasses. They found it hilarious, for reasons you will understand if you’ve watched much anime; sunglasses seem to be either for fashionable purposes or as a disguise, not everyday sun protection.


Gundam Seed's Athrun Zala
Athrun Zala
Athran Zala in disguise in Gundam Seed Destiny
Totally unrecognisable body-guard

Unfortunately years of dodgeballs to the face, being dropped or sat on and in one case falling overboard into the ocean (the glasses, not me) have taken their toll on the glasses I brought over from Australia. It’s not that I have anything against Japanese sunglasses, it’s just that they all say “UV cut” and nothing else, which tells me exactly nothing about how much protection my eyes are actually getting. It’s even worse when it comes to motorcycle glasses. Australia has safety standards to rate how shatter-proof riding glasses are. There’s no point in wearing a shatter-proof helmet if inside it your eyes are being cut to ribbons by a cheap pair of regular sunnies. While I am sure one can obtain safe sports eye-wear in Japan I just don’t have the language ability to figure out what ratings to look at or what brands to trust. I’ve been suffering recently with glare while riding (as well as in the playground) and frankly driving in Japan is scary enough when I can see for me to want to attempt it squinting. 

Luckily for me, an online discount eye-wear outlet site called Smartbuyglasses not only stocks high velocity rated sunglasses in amongst the Ray-Bans and Juicy Couture but also were kind enough to give me a pair in exchange for me introducing their site. I’m not personally interested in fashion or brand names; I always bought my sunglasses from the Cancer Council in Australia. If fashion is your thing, the 50 % off price tags will probably be appealing. For me the advantages of the site are two-fold. First, I can google the models in English to get an SPF for sunglasses, and second, they have motorcycle and other sports glasses (PAINTBALL GLASSES!!!) with durability and safety ratings I can trust and understand.

The fact of the matter is, I can be a bit of a dick on the road. I follow the rules as much as I can, no one else does, and there are never any police there to protect me. Australians who complain that traffic policing is all about revenue raising, please try riding two wheels in Japan and then see how you feel. I've had lit cigarettes and cans thrown at me for daring to drive only seven or eight kilometres over the speed limit instead of twenty like everyone else. So, I have been known to take my revenge on people who overtake me dangerously by waiting until they get stopped at the next set of traffic lights, coolly and calmly making my way up to the head of the queue (legal in Japan) and then taking off at exactly the speed limit. It drives them crazy, they do another insane over-take on a blind corner, burn off into the distance, get stuck at traffic lights, rinse, repeat. I know it is evil but sometimes I just need to make myself feel better (for the record, I started doing this after having things thrown at me, it has not been the cause of any projectiles yet). After confessing this naughty habit to my dear husband he mildly suggested that I should "ride safely now that we are starting a family..." XD So, long story short, I am happy to be adding some high velocity glasses to my collection of safety gear. Thanks Smartbuyglasses.
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Saturday, 15 September 2012

Beer Garden Cosplay Band

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I’m less of a geek than I used to be. I haven’t watched anime much this year, I don’t have a Cylon toaster (but I’d really really love one), I’ve only mentioned the Chris Benoit conspiracy three times in the last six months and I haven’t even joined in the hilarious harassment of the Scifi Channel on Facebook. Nevertheless, I am occasionally reminded that I am still somewhat of a freak, even in Japan. Our welcome party for new ALTs was one such occasion.
We had fifty attendees for the party, so a beer garden was the only viable budget option. We ended up on the roof of a department store. We had been told that the entry price included live entertainment, and the website featured pictures of Hula dancers. As it turned out, the entertainment for the night we were there was a band in cosplay performing anime theme songs. Not many… they played the same set twice. I am pretty sure I recognised the guitarist from the local rockabilly nightclub, so my guess is that the cosplay band is a fun side project and not taken too seriously. The first song they played was “My Boyfriend is a Pilot” from Macross. Ahh, the memories. Macross was the first anime I ever saw. It was on TV in Australia (well, butchered into a version relabelled Robotec) in about 1995 and unusually for my family circumstances I was actually allowed to watch it. It left an indelible mark in my aesthetic sensibilities. The vocalist called out to the crowd to name the song. After a long an awkward silence someone offered an incorrect guess. The nostalgia coupled with the amount of alcohol I had already consumed led to me eventually jumping up, running to the stage and yelling the correct answer. In the interval the vocalist came over for a chat and, showing off far more than is excusable in polite society, I sang the theme song of the character she was cosplaying. After that all throughout the second set (which was actually just the first set repeated) she kept trying to get the rest of the crowd to identify songs, saying “come on Japan! How come the foreigners know more about anime than you?” then giving up, pointing the mike to our section and invariably we would all shout out the correct answer. Perhaps never before having had such an enthusiastic audience, she invited us to stand in front of the stage, where in true drunk gaijin fashion we started a mosh pit and the other nerds and I joined in loudly on all the choruses. At the end of this quite enjoyable evening I turned to leave and saw that an entire section of the Board of Education (my employer) had come in for their own party and had witnessed all of the frivolity. Fortunately they seemed to think that it was hilarious.

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Sunday, 12 August 2012

My Dog, Musashi

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Hayate’s full name is actually Black Hayate. He was named after Lieutenant Hawkeye’s dog from Full Metal Alchemist, who in turn was named following the running in-joke of the military characters being named after military vehicles. Hayate is a fighter plane (Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate).
Manga Scan Taken From http://adventuresofcomicbookgirl.tumblr.com

Hayate (疾風) means gale, and that suits my speedy little boy down to the ground. After he has torn through a room it certainly looks like a gale has past.

"I made it snow in summer!"
 A lot of people call Hayate “Musashi”. Recently a lot of neighbours have been referring to Hayate as Musashi. They saw his name on the flyers I gave out when he was missing, but when they see him they call him Muashi. I asked one of my teachers about it once. After a year she still kept mixing up his name. I asked if it was because he looked more like a Musashi than a Hayate but she said that it’s just that she remembered it was a three syllable, cool sounding Japanese name. The first name that comes to mind when thinking of these criteria is Musashi.
Musashi is pretty cool. But I still like Hayate.

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Saturday, 7 July 2012

Tanabata: Star Festival 七夕

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In Japan, things tend to be ordered from large to small; general to specific. You give your name family name first then given name. You write your address from prefecture to street number. In Australia we do the opposite: Street number to state, given name then family. Likewise Australian dates are the exact reverse of Japanese dates. Australians write day/month/year and Japanese write year/month/day. There’s a consistency in the thought processes that leads to these ways of writing dates. Why on earth Americans write month/day/year I have no idea. But then, I also have no idea why they say “I could care less” not “I COULDN’T case less.” Anyway, this does have something to do with Tanabata, I promise. Tanabata is celebrated on July seventh, which is 7/7 no matter which system one uses to write dates. Tanabata is not a public holiday, but we do get “star jelly” in school lunch to celebrate it. 


Tanabata Desert

 The Story of Tanabata

According to wikipedia
Orihime (織姫 Weaving Princess), daughter of the Tentei (天帝 Sky King, or the universe itself), wove beautiful clothes by the bank of the Amanogawa (天の川 Milky Way, lit. "heavenly river"). Her father loved the cloth that she wove and so she worked very hard every day to weave it. However, Orihime was sad that because of her hard work she could never meet and fall in love with anyone. Concerned about his daughter, Tentei arranged for her to meet Hikoboshi (彦星 Cow Herder Star) (also referred to as Kengyuu (牽牛)) who lived and worked on the other side of the Amanogawa. When the two met, they fell instantly in love with each other and married shortly thereafter. However, once married, Orihime no longer would weave cloth for Tentei and Hikoboshi allowed his cows to stray all over Heaven. In anger, Tentei separated the two lovers across the Amanogawa and forbade them to meet. Orihime became despondent at the loss of her husband and asked her father to let them meet again. Tentei was moved by his daughter’s tears and allowed the two to meet on the 7th day of the 7th month if she worked hard and finished her weaving. The first time they tried to meet, however, they found that they could not cross the river because there was no bridge. Orihime cried so much that a flock of magpies came and promised to make a bridge with their wings so that she could cross the river. It is said that if it rains on Tanabata, the magpies cannot come and the two lovers must wait until another year to meet.
Long long ago, when we first came to Kyushu my husband worked in a highly academic English language pre-school (yes, there are academic pre-schools). He was tasked with writing the script for a Tanabata play, using concepts and vocabulary appropriate for children as young as three. The preschool version has Tentei getting cross because Orihime and Hikoboshi kept sneaking off to have picnics together instead of doing their chores (^_^)

Nana

Read the manga, watch the anime, listen to the tribute CDs... but stay away from the live action movie

Tanabata is deeply intertwined in my brain with Yazawa Ai’s manga “NANA”, about two girls named Nana (which is also the pronunciation of the number seven in Japanese: the 七 part of 七夕) who meet on the train to Tokyo and end up sharing an apartment (number 707) together. Tanabata (7/7) has a special significance that becomes increasingly tragic throughout the manga.

Tree of Wishes

Wish Tree
For Tanabata, the tradition is to set up a leafy bamboo branch and decorate it using long pieces of paper with wishes written on them. Traditionally at the end of the celebrations the branch is thrown into a stream to carry the wishes away… but these days the whole thing usually goes in the burnable garbage. Don’t worry though, the smoke probably rises up to the stars (and gives Orihime asthma).
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