Update #5: A Little Slice of Life

Woah! I remembered to update my blog on Sunday! It's like I'm turning over a new leaf or something! ...Okay, self-praise aside, I don't have that much exciting news to talk about from this past week, so I thought I'd share a few stories, and then talk about random tidbits of Japanese life in general. Hopefully it's still a little interesting to read, so let's get to it.

On the school front of things, the main highlight was, as it usually is, the Anime and Video Games culture class. This week's class was another extra awesome edition because we had another guest speaker! This time was the producer of Shirogumi Inc.!

That might not be much of a bombshell at first hear, but they're actually a really major animation company for Japanese media - they've done a lot of animation and graphics work for lots of popular series and games. Some of their big stuff from recent years include the graphics of the Dark Souls and Armored Core series. They also did a lot of commercials for old Nintendo games such as Mario and Star Fox. The topic was about the job of being a producer for an animation studio. It wasn't as scintillating a topic as the last one, but still quite cool and informative. And we got to watch a lot of commercials and footage and sample stuff, so it was a fun class nonetheless. =D I'll bomb a few links just to give an idea of what kinda stuff they had.

(Shirogumi website) http://www.shirogumi.com/
(Mario Kart 64, JP CM) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=134B-G7NFCA
(Mister Donut CM) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf6YPHqQ3ig
(Pokemon XD, JP CM) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU0QJsutUIk

The other adventure this week was a trip to Nakano over the weekend! We were going to the area's Mandrake, a chain of second-hand goods stores. The area itself was pretty sweet though, just walking out of the train station found me looking at a rather impressive view of the opening to a market street. It was all so picturesque, so I took a bunch of pictures as we walked along the street.

The shopping street right outside of Nakano station! It's actually outdoors'ish.
Even if it looks like there's a roof with the window and all, you feel the outside air.

Just a random shot. Look, a bakery!

Revolving sushi restaurant. =w= I wish we went, now that I think about it,
but too much shopping lol.

Random outlet of crane machines just there. Japan's all for these things
apparently. Also amused that all the customers at this instance are girls. I guess
the machines here are stocked with cute things or something.

Here's the big department store! Admittedly, I was really confused at the name
Nakano Broadway, and was confused why were going in there for a while.

Leonardo da Vinci gachapon. Did people really chunk 100￥s for this machine?
It's funny at least though!

Leaving. =( Night time in the ceiling window!

So anyways, back to shopping. The Mandrake stores were actually only a few small outlets in a somewhat sizable department store, so we took the time to peek around the whole department store. There were quite a variety of places, actually - though most of them were merchandise stores of some kind. The local merchandise outlets were quite nice though, and had some really sweet rare finds of stuff from old series, so I was pretty happy about that (I found more Tales of Legendia things, pleasant surprise). Aside from the merchandise stores, there were also toy stores, jewelry and bag stores, a board game shop, a "weird stuff" store, and strangely enough, an army themed store. There were also mini-arcades strewn about running cabinets of older fighting games like Street Fighter II and Marvel vs Capcom 2. I'm no good at those old-school ones though, so I didn't play, though it was pretty interesting that these outlets were pretty populated.

Well, that's about the highlight events for the week. Nothing too extraordinary - school's school after all. Though, I feel like I could make some comments about what living in Japan has been like so far, now that it's been a few months.

If I had to describe living in Japan in short - I'd call it expensive, but very convenient and efficient. Everyday goods cost a little bit on the high side, usually around the price in the US or a little higher, but that's not too eye-widening of a problem. On the other hand, it's very interesting seeing the differences in Japan's take on the urban lifestyle compared to the US.

One of the foremost examples is the convenience store. I think I mentioned how awesome they were in one of my first blog posts, but I didn't realize then just how really convenient conbinis are here. To be honest, when I think about the convenience stores in the US, I usually think of it as a place to grab a quick snack with pals, or to get a sub sandwich for lunch.

In Japan though, it's really something that plays a vital role in people's lives. You can buy snacks and drinks of course, but there's a lot more than that. As mentioned before, there's bento sets which available which are similar in principle to TV dinners in the US, but a lot higher quality and probably more worth its cost. And healthier. And fresher. Also, you can get these bento sets microwaved at the register so they're ready to nom as soon as you get back home, if you so desire. It's quite a nice service really. They also sell general living supplies, such as toilet paper, paper kitchenware, garbage bags, shampoo & soap, toothpaste... pretty much anything daily life essentials, you can grab at your 5-10 minute nearby conbini.

Perhaps the most interesting service the conbini offers however, is bill payment. In Japan, it's very common for people to pay monthly bills through the conbini. Health insurance, rent, all those jazz - you can arrange to receive your bills for them in the mail with a barcode that can be scanned and paid at the conbini. As a foreigner, this is pretty great for me, since I don't have to set up a credit card or pay checks on a regular basis; just need to pay the bills at the conbini that I'm at almost every day anyways.

Speaking of convenience, Japan has a lot of convenient technology in place for so much of everyday life. For instance, I got something called a Suica card, which is basically this cash card that's used as an EZ-pass for public transportation such as buses and trains. I bought a daily commuter pass on it, which lets me ride the train to the campus where I have classes, or to any stop along that line - it's a money efficient deal just in going to school every day, but we can also sneak in savings by going to Mita and then transferring to get slightly lower ticket prices on trips that are nearer to Mita than Hiyoshi. Hooray! But more importantly, back to the convenience angle - these Suica cards are also usable in conbinis as a cash card, and you can actually scan them on most vending machines to pay for your drink. It's basically this card that you can use on any kind of daily life expense. Certainly not necessary, but Japanese society really likes to make use of everything they can.

A few other random things... oh, they have really useful implements for umbrellas lying around most public places. First of all, a lot of buildings that have visitors will have umbrella racks lying around, so that's a plus. Bringing those long umbrellas around indoors is always annoying. Second is, some places have this nice thing that wraps your umbrella into a plastic bag so it's not dripping around everywhere if you do bring it indoors. Thirdly, some places have a machine that's basically an automated umbrella dryer. You just dip your umbrella in, and swoosh it around, and it comes out all nice and dry. Makes using an umbrella a lot more appealing of an option around here!

Well, it's kinda late over here now, and I can't think of anything more off the top of my head, so I'll just leave it at that for now. Next time, I'll be sure to take memos when I do think of some interesting aspects in experiencing Japan, so maybe I'll have more to write here next week. Oh, and apparently we're having a field trip to the Shirogumi animation's studio for this coming week's anime and video game class. So that'll probably be a really cool thing to rant about. =3

'Til next time! As always, I hope you enjoyed the little read!

Addendum Post: Japan and Limited Animation

This post is a companion post to Update #4, since I didn't want to write this whole spiel on that page in case you didn't want to read it. It's a mix of what was presented in the lecture by Masaaki Oosumi and my impressions from the lecture, so keep that in mind while you read!



At first, Japanese animators did indeed create full-animations, much in the spirit of works that were inspiring the time. What changed things was the creation of Astro Boy, and the concept of regularly released TV anime series that accompanied it. Full-animation is rather costly and time-consuming, which is okay when a company is creating movies since they can set their own timelines. It's not okay when you're making TV series, which release an episode every week. Early endeavors into animating Astro Boy found that the weekly time constraint made it extraordinarily difficult to fully animate things and make the deadline while retaining the content. So what to do?

The creators of Astro Boy decided to resort to "limited-animation". By limiting the amount of components moving in any given scene, the amount of time needed to animate a mere second of film decreased exponentially. The trade-off of course, was a rather significant dive in quality compared to previous works, but this shift in technique made it possible to air hand-drawn animation on a weekly basis.

The amazing part to me is the progression afterwards. In true Japanese fashion, Japanese animators took this "limited-animation" and built upon it to work around its shortcomings. For instance, Oosumi-sensei showed us a clip from Lupin the 3rd, where Lupin does a car stunt involving leaping the car over a foothill to switch with a doppelganger car driven by his comrade in order to trick his enemies.

The stunt would be difficult to present to the viewer clearly if done in the normal style of limited-animation involving reducing the moving components, so they took another route. At the apex of the leap, the anime presented a series of stills from several different angles to illustrate a brief snapshot of the situation. Done like so, the viewer has a lucid idea of what's going on, and then the animation can resume as it was before, confident in having conveyed its clever trick.

What I like a lot about techniques such as the above is that it takes the 'negative' aspects of limited-animation, and utilizes them in an interesting way that goes beyond the "settling for less" notion that seems to be thought of limited-animation. In my opinion, the use of stills and slow-motion effects that are often utilized in limited-animation are an interesting method of placing emphasis in a scene. When only one thing is moving in the first place, a viewer's eye will probably already wander there, and compounded with properly done stills and such can really make a particular aspect of a scene jump out to a viewer (and, if the animators want to be clever, they can use it as a distraction for a Chekhov's Gun [read tvtropes if you don't know the term and are curious - I dunno how else to describe it other than in tvtropes terms ^^;] sitting in the background). Personally, I believe that these kinds of techniques would not have risen in a world where people only knew full animation.

With the advent of computer-animation, it's actually possible for Japanese animators to do full-animation again, even for weekly TV series. But even with that in mind, in my opinion, they should not make full-animation the standard. I believe that the rather 'focused' style that limited-animation brings to the table is now something characteristic of Japanese animated media. The stills and slow-motion effects mentioned before almost certainly paved the way towards later effects such as delayed effects (like the thing where a samurai does a dashing slash through something, and it gets cut into pieces a second later - there might be a real term for this, but I don't know it), multiple-angle shots, and cut-ins like you see in games (such as Persona, and it's now quite trademark of it).

While cheesy at times, I think used properly, these techniques can really be neat, and I think that they've become an important part of what makes Japanese media so unique and appealing. It is true that limited-animation originally arose as a cheap substitute to Disney's full animation. But instead of trying to emulate full-animation, Japanese animators embraced the unique characteristics of limited-animation and developed it into a style of its own that is, rather than simply being worse than full-animation, is now just an existence of its own. By continuing to use the limited-animation techniques they have been using, Japan has stuck to a big part of what makes their media so charming.

And so ends my summary on Oosumi's lecture. Hope it was at least close to as interesting as the lecture from the man himself!

Update #4: Super Delayed Edition

Has it really been almost a month? My forgetfulness knows no bounds sometimes it seems, but I'm back now at least! If anything, at least the long hiatus gave me a big backlog to talk about? If I can remember what happened over the last month anyways, but let's find out haha. ^^; Also, my camera finger is still on siesta, so not so many pictures again this update. D=

... Okay wow, this remembering stuff is hard. The middle two weeks of April weren't too exciting for the most part, it was mostly just going to classes and some humble days of ordinary life. There isn't too much to say about that except for one hype story, which I'll get to later - first I'll go ahead and throw out a new batch of photos from Mita, and then talk about university in general.

More flowers on campus! Credit goes to Steph as usual because
I don't think to take many pictures lol.

Bam, close up.

An overlooking cliff from campus!

Here's more!

A nice shade of pink. :D

Close-up!

White flowers!

And another close-up!

Sakura! Or so they look like, but the sakura already bloomed. =(

Here's a series of shots of the way home! The gate view, which
I think I have a picture of before, but it's still pretty grand.

Trees along the path home!

Here's the crossing just outside the Keio gate.

And the same crossing.

The scenery outside the subway station. Nice and scenic.

A structure outside the NEC Super Tower which is right next to said station

Better shot, different angle.

Here's the Tower itself. It's really tall. It's like an American skyscraper.

Ground level. Couldn't get the whole building in one shot.

Station entrance and sign!

Some stairs descending into the station.

And the bottom. It's not as impressive when there isn't a giant blob of people
from rush hour. It's really a sight to behold, even when you're caught in it.

And this is entering into the actual station. That's all for Mita - next jump is...

Classes really do have a more... relaxed, less strict kind of vibe...? Compared to American universities at least. The teachers have been a lot more lax than I expected for the most part, in both the English and Japanese classes, and not just in teaching. Apparently classes get canceled here pretty frequently if the professor wants to - the university's web system actually has an entire service in place whose sole purpose is to tell you what classes have been cancelled. There's something to be said when class cancellation happens often enough to justify making a service for it...

But anyways, onto fun things! The third week of April, we had a guest speaker for the Japanese Anime and TV Games class, and it's quite a big name: Masaaki Oosumi! (not the same as the teacher of the class, if you noticed the same last name. it was kinda confusing) He's a director in the anime industry, and he was director for some famous works such as Moomin and Lupin the 3rd!

So how'd that class go? Oosumi-sensei was a pretty chill guy actually, it was an interesting talk, too. The topic of his talk was a bit of history in the Japanese animation industry, and the transition from "full animation" (think like Disney films, where several elements are constantly in motion - facial expressions changing as a character is moving dynamically, etc.) to a simpler, "limited animation" (few, often one element moving at a time - e.g. in anime, characters often don't move while their mouth is moving for speaking) that well characterizes anime today.

Surprisingly, it's not the first I'd heard of the topic (minus the jargon anyways). I've heard people cite Disney's animation style as proof that American animation was superior to Japanese anime in terms of quality. While that's a bold (and in my personal opinion, rather wrong) assertion, it certainly brings up the mystery as to why Japanese anime, which was to some extent spurred on by the world's awe over Disney's works, didn't hold up to the bar set by their 'predecessor', so to speak.

As a director during the days when anime was still a new industry, Oosumi-sensei's insight really shed a lot of light on the mystery (I think. He lectured in Japanese, so I didn't pick up 100%, but I think I got the general gist). In retrospect, the concepts do seem kind of obvious, so some people reading this might already know some of these things, especially folks who work animation themselves. Nonetheless, I found it interesting, so I'll go talk about it some. Actually, I talked about it too much, so I'm going to make it into a separate post and put a link to it here because it's really long.

http://zam-japan.blogspot.com/2013/05/addendum-post-japan-and-limited.html

Also, during this talk, he also gave us some example cels that were used in limited animation! Pretty nice hands-on learning right here. Check them out!

Cel samples from Director Oosumi! An artist painting a landscape, consisting of
two cels - the background with the artist, and the painting arm.

Here's the arm cel. Just rotate it a bit and...

And look, it changed!

And here's the background cel without the arm

Okay, so enough about anime, even if it's cool. After the two weeks of school, we then come to what is called "Golden Week" in Japan! It's basically a clump of holidays that all take place during the last week of April into the first week of May - there're so many holidays over the short span that the government, and most companies, simply give 9 days off over this period of time. It's one of, if not the most, long break periods in the year for company workers, so it's a pretty sweet break. Being me, I spent most of it relaxing and being lazy. Ploop.

Well, I did go around a little bit. We went to Shibuya since Steph was meeting with a friend, so I spent a little bit of time exploring Shibuya solo. It was pretty cool, and kind of amusing since there was so much stereotypical foreigner stuff there - There was a Denny's restaurant on the second floor of a building, and right below it was a cowboy shop. "Yee-haw, Denny's, just like the American way!"

... I had to do that lol. I didn't do that much else though in Shibuya - because after lunch at Mos Burger (apparently a quite good chain of American-Japanese food, their Teriyaki burger was awesome!), I went to Club Sega (arcade chain) and played there for 5 hours. Japanese arcades are awesome by the way, they're like 20 times better than American ones.

The first major difference between Japanese arcades and American ones is that Japanese arcades actually have people inside (I'd say I'm joking, but it's actually true. RIP arcades in the US :<). The second major difference is that Japanese arcades are really tall! Seriously, every Club Sega or Taito Station has like 5 floors. They certainly aren't as big per floor as like, Dave & Busters, but they're more densely packed with machines and content, so I would say that Japanese arcades have as many machines as D&B. 

Except that in Japanese arcades, the cabinets aren't awful. Both in content quality and in physical quality. I swear, half of the machines in D&Bs I go to in the US are broken, and even if they weren't broken, most of them are awful things like Cabel's Big Game Hunter or Deal or No Deal. SO HYPE. I guess you get skeeball too, but that doesn't last THAT long. Oh, and you get crane machines that are not only usually impossible, but they're also chock full of prizes that nobody cares about unless you find the occasional one with Pokemon plushies in them.

In Japanese game centers, your game selection is divided by floor. It often varies by place, but there are often entire floors devoted to Pachinko machines (basically Japanese equivalent of slot machines, and a pretty big source of gambling problems). At the Club Sega I went to, I mainly chilled on the basement floor - it basically had all the virtual games, including the most relevant to me: fighting games! They had Blazblue, Tekken Tag 2, Under-Night In-Birth, and Guilty Gear XXACP. So much anime fighters in one place, I'm so happy. ='D

On the first floor, they had rhythm games and crane machines. Of interest is the Taiko game, which is a really fun game where you hit a taiko drum (traditional Japanese drum) with mallets based on prompts on screen - either having to hit the face of the drum or the rim of it based on the symbol shown. A two note rhythm game doesn't sound that hard, but it's actually harder than it looks. And a lot more tiring. But really fun! Also the song selection is the best - count me sold when you rhythm game's categories include J-Pop songs, Vocaloid songs, anime songs, and game themes. Everything I ever wanted and more. =D Also, there was a Project Diva machine, but that's not as exciting to talk about, so I'll just say it was there, and it was fun, and I in fact fed it like 500￥ in playtime.

Actually, one of the neatest little things about Japanese arcades is the card tracking system. You can buy player cards of various brands which host certain games, and it'll track your lifetime stats for the respective game. For example, I got a Nesica card, which is used for Aksys games, so I now have an account on the Japanese community site for Blazblue! If you know what I'm even talking about and you wanna look up my profile, my Blazblue player name is 「ZAMというCMUからの留学生」, minus the quotes. The coolest icing on the cake is that you can also use your cell phone camera in place of a card once you get an account. It makes a lot of sense given Japanese society's emphasis on mobile devices, but still, using your phone as a universal player card is a really sweet concept, you gotta admit.

So yeah. Japanese arcades are fun. I spent like, $30 in one day, but it was a fun day at least. So next segment is... food! We had a few new food adventures over the month. Notable things I remember was a soba place in Mita, a tonkatsu place in Hiyoshi, and new cafeteria menu for the month! Got pictures for all but the tonkatsu place, since the tonkatsu place was kinda empty the day we went, and the owners were just sitting around, so it felt like it'd be awk to just take shots. The food was pretty good, though they gave a giant mountain of lettuce alongside the tonkatsu. That was pretty hard to dive through, but oh well. Pictures, ho!

My set from the soba place! Picked veggies, unagi, and a bowl of soba. It's
a pretty hearty meal in of itself.

Steph's set! Beefbowl and soba noodles.

Pasta from a cafe near the station. Pasta was okay... didn't give that much,
but the ice cocoa was good!

I do like creamy cheese sauces though at least. Mine was pretty good.

New menu option at the cafeteria: Chicken katsu rice bowl with tomato sauce.
Not bad.

Shoyu ramen. Nothing like having a vast range of ramen flavors at
your school cafeteria. It's cheap, legit, and filling.

Lastly, I'll finish off this post with some pictures from Akihabara and Shibuya! 'Til the next update!

There's something picturesque about people pacing the narrow streets
lined with shops.

That advertisement. Cool Old Dude.

Taken at the Shibuya crossing. The crowds are impressive as always,
you can feel the youthful vibrance in the air!

And another picture taken around the same location. Shibuya landscape.

And to finish it off, the Hachiko statue near Shibuya station.
A famous meeting place! Check out wiki for information, it's a
bittersweet folklegend. =(

... Oops, it's been awhile.

... Oh wow, I haven't updated this in a long time. I'm really silly. >_> I keep forgetting. D=

Doubt anyone will read this, but I think I give up on updating weekly because I don't do enough on a weekly basis to justify it, and I never remember anyways. Hopefully I'll do some updates now and then though! I'll do one soon, tomorrow night or Saturday morning. And now that I've said it on the internet, I have to keep my word, right?