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.
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. =( |
No comments:
Post a Comment