Kochi Ramblings

Posted on June 17, 2008 by baudattitude

Kochi reminds me a lot of Eugene, the town I grew up in. In certain aspects, anyway. Both are on the small side, but large enough that the outside world knows about them – while you don’t have access to EVERYTHING you’d have in a larger city, you’re not completely bereft of options.

They’re both also small enough that you can get most anywhere on foot, or by bus if you don’t feel like walking. Kochi has the advantage of having a streetcar in addition to the bus system, which is dreadfully convenient.

Oh, and both start to shut down around six o’clock and are mostly dead by nine.

But, during the day anyway, Kochi is actually quite a busy place. After checking out of my hotel and stowing my backpack at the JR station, I went exploring.

Now, it’s worth mentioning here that my initial exposure to Kochi came from watching Umi Ga Kikoeru, one of the Studio Ghibli movies that I don’t think has been released in the US yet. Much of the movie focuses on the differences between Kochi people and a Tokyo native who’s forced to live there – and hates it, of course, because it’s so backwards and everyone talks weird there.

Having seen plenty of Tokyo now, I wanted to see somewhere completely different: Kochi fit the description nicely.

The Japanese are not big into superstores, which is a good thing, because Kochi is the sort of town that they drop a Wal-Mart into the middle of and watch all the local merchants die. It has several shopping districts, all full of the sort of small-but-intensely-specialized shops that typify Japan – as an example: A shop that only sells towels.

The Japanese also aren’t big into food courts; the restaurants are mixed right in with the stores. Dozens of tiny restaurants, most selling their own little food specialty, with plenty of competition for food of any type – nothing like American malls, where one fast food joint will have a monopoly on burgers, another a monopoly on tacos, and so on.

End result: The shopping streets are busy, crowded, noisy, confusing, and all-around fun. I might think differently if I had to try to make sense of them in order to buy life essentials – but, as a tourist, I quite enjoy wandering them.

Actually, if you need anything ESSENTIAL, a combini will probably carry it – if you just need a towel, right now, for whatever reason, a combini will hook you up with a plain, servicable white towel without any trouble.

But I digress. Kochi has several of these shopping districts and they were fun to explore.

I wasn’t really expecting to see anything fanboy oriented in Kochi, so it was a bit of a surprise to run into a nicely-stocked Animate. I say nicely-stocked even though I didn’t buy anything: one of the important lessons I’ve learned travelling around Japan with a backpack is that you have to carry everything you buy IN the backpack.

Also, I blew half my shopping budget on day 2 when I bought the EEE, so I’m being good.

To a point.

Did I just digress again? My apologies.

Anyway, one of the streets I was rambling down opened out into a sort of plaza with an oddly shaped building in the middle of it – I wasn’t sure what it was, but it looked funky and it drew me close.

It turned out to be – and I think it’s only this through the end of August, I don’t think that this is a permanent exhibition – the “Treasure Island of Kaiyodo” exhibition.

Kaiyodo being a manufacturer of plastic models and super-detailed action figures and, in general, many very cool things that I won’t ever own.

This, I did not expect to find in Kochi.

After a moment’s confusion where I tried to walk into the exhibit hall without paying – I didn’t yet realize what I’d walked into and thought it was just a store – I got permission to take photographs and spent a happy 40 minutes or so wandering through the exhibits taking pictures of, well, action figures. Yeah, I dropped Y500 so I could wander around and photograph toys. Anyone who has a problem with that, you’re not My People anyway.

There was also a store, thoughtfully stocked with many of the VERY SAME action figures from the exhibits – how peculiar, right? – in addition to some Kaiyodo merchandise only available at the exhibition. I passed on the Y4700 Monsieur Bome repaint figures: I’m not crazy, also the whole backpack thing.

One of the locations semi-prominently featured in Umi Ga Kikoeru is the waterfront in Kochi. I couldn’t figure out where this was, since it wasn’t on the tourist-centric map I got from the hotel. Kochi is also a bit inland, so I came to the conclusion that the characters must have been in a neighboring town in those scenes, or something.

Then I passed a sign that said “Kochi Port – 3km” at just about the same time a streetcar pulled up facing in the direction of the arrow on the sign.

I tell you, life works in mysterious ways.

For the record: When you are boarding a streetcar in Kochi, you get on through the REAR entrance and you pay when you are getting OFF. In addition, if you don’t have exact change, there’s a small change exchanger up by the driver, directly to the left of the slot you drop payment in to. I mention these things in the small hope that they may be helpful to someone else someday, probably under quite peculiar circumstances.

Or, if you’re me, you get on board through the wrong door, ask how much the fare is, try to hand it directly to the attendant, get told to put it in the small change exchanger because you’re trying to pay Y200 for a Y190 fare, get exact change that way, try to hand it to the attendant, get the fare slot pointed out to you, try to pay immediately and get met with a hand physically imposed between your change and the fare slot and a curt “pay later” instruction.

ANYWAY. For the record, on the streetcar BACK, I acquited myself better.

I got to Kochi port and wasn’t quite sure what to do next – I mean, just because movie characters can stroll on down to the waterfront doesn’t mean that you can do it in real life, especially not in the US where casually walking around a port with a camera out would almost certainly get you arrested and beaten.

Then I saw a bunch of people fishing off a dock and figured that it was probably OK to go wandering around over there.

If you need a good antidote to the high-speed life, I strongly recommend travelling to Kochi, in mid-June, on a day with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-70s, and spending some time standing on the docks watching people fish and enjoying an extremely refreshing breeze.

I recognize, having said that, that it’s not exactly a VIABLE stress cure if you don’t already happen to be on Shikoku or if it’s not June, but go for it anyway.

It took some effort to pull myself away and head back into town to look for lunch. I never did get any katsuo no tataki, the mostly-raw tuna specialty I was talking about yesterday, it turned out to be another of those regional specialities that’s not actually all that common. The one place I DID find advertising it was apparently only open for dinner; I’d walked past it the previous night and it had been brightly lit up and quite lively looking, during the day it was locked down tight.

Oh, and it also had a big whale sign, which being Japan probably wasn’t just for looks.

Attention, Japan: Whales are friends, not food.

No, really, GUYS.

I wound up eating at the station before hopping the train back to Okayama and then switching to a Shinkansen for Tokyo. Done directly like this, instead of splitting it over a couple of days and exploring as I go, it means that I lose a good seven hours right in the middle of one of my vacation days – I should take this personally, but somehow I’m quite relaxed about it.

I found the Momotaro statue while I was switching trains in Okayama, anyway, this is a meeting-people landmark in much the same way that Hachiko is in Shibuya, or so I’m told. Momotaro was mostly covered with pigeons, which is a sad fate but one that befalls all statues.

Oh, Kochi prefecture is apparently the birthplace of Anpanman, Japan’s favorite edible superhero, so some of the local trains are covered in Anpanman characters. Here’s one that happened to stop in front of me while I waited for my train back to Okayama.

It’s funny; writing all of the above, I expected the return to Tokyo to be jarring. Instead, it was surprisingly comforting – it’s nice to have half the signs in English, it’s nice not to stand out too much as a foreigner, and I actually kind of like the crowds – even at 10PM, people are still on the move, restaurants and businesses are still open, the place feels alive.

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Castles and Trains

Posted on June 16, 2008 by baudattitude

Happy to report that I started the morning without a yelp of surprise. There’s something about the mattress in a capsule hotel that makes it quite impossible to think you’re waking up anywhere else. It seemed perfectly comfortable when I went to sleep, some gnomes must have come in during the night and taken all the padding out.

The plan for today was simple and straightforward; it was therefore doomed to abject failure.

I planned to hit a couple of tourist attractions in Osaka, head to Okayama, spend some time there, and then be in Kochi by dinner time, sampling regional delicacies along the way.

This might have worked if I hadn’t gotten on completely the wrong subway train at Namba station in Osaka. I thought that i was getting on the “JR Loop Line”, which lives up to its name in that it’s a circuit around Osaka. I was wrong. I actually wound up on a train to Nara, which is not a loop. I didn’t realize this until I started seeing stations that looked more and more “small town” and less urban – I hadn’t been paying attention to station names because, well, I figured that I was on a loop, I just needed to listen for Osaka-eki and I’d be fine.

Long story short – when I realized this, I dashed out the door of one train, directly across the platform into the doors of another train going BACK to Osaka, and lost about an hour in the process.

That minor setback aside, a few other things conspired to make me lose 10 minutes here and there… I had to scale back plans a little. Mostly I dropped my plan to visit Okayama castle, though I may hit it on the way back.

Umeda Sky Building, with its twin towers bridged at the top by an observator, is basically a “get high up and look around” sort of thing. It’s got some impressive views of Osaka and a couple of escalators that you shouldn’t ride if you have any fear of heights – they start at the 34th floor and go OUTSIDE up to the 39th floor, enclosed of course but still…

The observation deck of this tower is open to the elements, though it does have a sort of moat thing that looks like it would prevent anyone from jumping. I’m sure that, in Japan, suicide capital of the known world, that design is PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

There’s a nice little placard, which I failed to photograph, that basically said “don’t wear a hat up here if it’s windy” which I thought was Sound Advice.

Nice views of Osaka, especially of the bridges.

Not knowing Osaka at all kind of cut into the impact of the views – no “I can see my house from here!” factor, you see – but I got to enjoy watching natives point out stuff to each other and get quite animated arguing about what building was what.

From there, I navigated my way back to the subway system – coming FROM Umeda Sky Building, I found the convenient underground tunnel that runs directly from Osaka station to the building, this makes the trip about 10 minutes on foot instead of the 20-30 minutes that it might take someone to get there if they decided to, I don’t know, take the first exit they came to in Osaka station, scan the skyline for their destination, and then try to figue out how to get there using sidewalks. You’d have to be a complete fool to go THAT route.

…

Anyway, subway system, four stops to Osaka Castle Park station. Osaka Castle Park station living up to its name, Osaka Castle is surrounded by a rather nice wooded park full of roaming cats. The feral cat population in Japan is one of the things I find most depressing about the country, but these cats didn’t look too badly off. Some of them were obviously on the prowl for small animals to eat, but there were an equal measure who’d found a spot of shade to lie down in and wait out the midday heat – and they were completely unafraid of people, the most reaction I got from any of them was a half opened eye to say “Yes, I know you’re there.”

Osaka Castle is DAMNED impressive from the outside.

Inside, well, it’s a museum with lots of informative displays about the guy responsible for building it. There’s nothing of the original castle left except for a few outbuildings, the keep itself is a modern reconstruction.

There are two floors of neat artifacts; these are also the floors where photography is prohibited. Did I mention that the museum sells nice photo books of all the artifacts? Do I have to mention this? OK, so the photography prohibition is really there to prevent the artifacts from being destroyed by slow exposure to flashes, but still…

Osaka castle didn’t really take that long to explore. Got a few photos that will hopefully be desktop-background-quality. I had some takoyaki at a small booth on the grounds of the castle – and I survived the experience, though I wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat it – and got back on the subway to Shin-Osaka station where I could catch a shinkansen to Okayama.

Okayama was where I started to feel well and truly off the map. This is unfair – the city is on a great many maps, even some that aren’t necessarily all that detailed – but it’s the first place I’ve been that speaking Japanese has seemed less like an affection and more like a survival skill. That is to say, this is the first city I’ve gotten to where the clerk at the JR counter has hit me with the “Oh my god I have to talk to a gaijin” face instead of the “Oh, time to bust out the English skills” face.

Nonetheless, she got me a ticket to Kochi and I had 45 minutes to kill.

Now, Okayama claims that it’s Momotaro’s hometown, and as such it has two regional specialties. The first is peaches, the second is a candy called kibi dango, which Momotaro is reputed to have fed to his animal friends before they went and whomped up on ogres.

I found peaches in the produce section of the station supermarket. I could have gotten a six pack of – admittedly gorgeous looking – peaches for right around $50.

That was a little rich for my blood. A small box of kibi dango set me back Y380 which was much more reasonable.

Eating a small box of kibi dango while on a 2.5 hour train ride is a good way to wind up with a horribly upset stomach, by the way. That somewhat negative aspect aside, it tastes an awful lot like botan rice candy and has the consistency of rather soft marshmallows. Not impressed, but you have to eat the regional specialty, right?

The train from Okayama to Kochi goes past some amazing scenery, both manmade and natural. The bridge between the two islands is six miles long, and it is quite startling to see massive container ships passing under the bridge and looking quite small. It’s hard to get a sense of the thing even when you’re on it; it’s one of those things that really makes you appreciate the kind of people who have the right sort of brains for mechanical engineering on a massive scale.

After you cross the bridge and wind up on Shikoku, you get to the natural scenery part of the ride; mile after mile of forested mountains punctuated by occasional bursts of civilization and cultivated fields. For a while, we were following a river – no idea on the name – that had absolutely stunning emerald water and tons of rapids, it was criminal how difficult it was to take any photographs from a moving train.

Got to Kochi around 8 PM, booked a room at the Comfort Hotel Kochi, changed, grabbed an area map and hit the streets. My goal was to get some photographs of Kochi castle at night, and I wasn’t about to be deterred by little things like not knowing where it was and never having been in Kochi before. It turned out to be about a half hour walk. Of course, the castle itself was long since closed up for the day, but nobody seemed to mind or actually notice me wandering the grounds and taking pictures. Hopefully some of them turn out all right.

Still nursing my upset stomach, I decided to hit a Lawson’s, get a katsu set microwaved by the helpful shop, and retreat back to my room instead of trying to sample Kochi’s regional delicacy, which is a sort of barely-cooked tuna dish. Maybe I’ll be up for it for lunch.

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Sacred places and weird food

Posted on June 16, 2008 by baudattitude

it’s kind of annoying that I don’t feel up to the task of pretending that I can’t read the notice on the inside of my capsule here; the one that says “no food or drink”, in Kanji of course.

I can’t actually read all of it, but I can get “eat” and “drink” and “inside the capsule” and I can kind of grok the rest from context.

There’s also no wireless internet, which is actually maybe not such a bad thing. I fear for the sanctity of this PC if it hooks up to a network before I’ve had a chance to really lock it down some.

Yes, I’m in a capsule hotel in Osaka, partially because it’s a pretty cheap way to spend a night and mostly because I got tired of people asking me if I’d ever stayed in one. So far it’s not so bad; the pajamas they provided don’t fit my lanky gaijin bones but that’s about it. Oh, and I can’t eat or drink of course. Did I mention that the bathrooms are all Japanese style? This marks the first time I haven’t been able to find a Western bathroom, and it’s an unsettling experience. I managed not to embarrass myself, but, well, it’s, uh, one more thing I can claim to have managed and I’ll leave it at that.

Let’s put the negatives aside. It was Y2700 for the night and that’s hard to beat without sleeping in a manga cafe.

My capsule is clean and smoke free, with plenty of room to stretch out, a surprise at 6’1″.


I have a radio and a TV, the radio reception is horrid but the TV works fine – It gets about a dozen channels, two of them are porn. There’s a lounge where I can go hang out, smoke, buy sake and play mahjong. All the comforts a salaryman on the road needs, I suppose. I find myself wondering; this is one of the rare capsule hotels with a wing for women, do they get the same porn channels or do they get their own? I’ve been around too many fujoshi lately, it’s corrupting me.

Today started mighty early; leaving the blinds and window open to let in the sounds of the Tokyo morning saw to that. I was up at 5:30, dressed and bathed and breakfasted by 7;00, sitting around waiting for the currency exchange desk to open after that. Made it to Tokyo station around 8:45 and was on my first Shinkansen at 9:03.

The trip to Nagoya was a quiet 2 hour trip through rice fields, punctuated by occasional city. It’s really quite difficult to get photographs out the window of a moving Shinkansen – the time you have from seeing something interesting to turning on the camera to centering the viewfinder on it is pretty short.

Nagoya was, well, it was quite enjoyable. I didn’t spend much time there, only enough to figure out the subway system and navigate myself to the second of Patrica Martin’s Three Holy Sites of Japan: Osu, but I had some excellent food and had a pleasant conversation with a Japanese gentleman who stopped me to figure out if I’d lost my group and needed any help. He turned out to be a history professor who occasionally has to teach exchange students, so his English was excellent. I still took the opportunity to get in some Japanese practice and he seemed tickled by it.

He gave me one of the handouts he’d prepared for his class, scolded me because I’d confessed to how few kanji I could write, and wished me a good time roaming around.

That diversion behind me, I was off to Osu.

Osu is a shopping district right next to Osu Kannon, which is a big Buddhist temple. For the sake of having some photographs I can show at work when I get back, I hit the temple grounds for some quick shots before diving in to the shopping district.


It’s no Akihabara. That’s not really an indictment, though: nothing is Akihabara but Akihabara. There’s a ton of fanboy-oriented stores and PC parts shops, but there’s more “normal” stores than either – most of them seem to exist only to supply the endless stream of weird T-shirts that the populace demands. The overall effect is kind of appealing, you can geek out to your heart’s content but you can also take a break from it if you choose. The biggest difference is the lack of maid cafes.


I wound up getting my sister a souvenir and myself a couple of CDs from the Nagoya branch of Gamers. This led to a small triumph over the forces of evil, not that the Gamers staff is really EVIL or anything… When they asked me if I had a Point card, I said no, and then I asked if I could have one.

They said that this would require me to fill out a form with my address and phone number.

I said that I didn’t live in Japan.

I thought that would be the end of it, and I was prepared to accept a “Sorry, Japanese only” at that point; I’d tried after all.

Instead, the cashier went for the phone, had a conversation on the phone, hung up, called a second person, had a short conversation, went over to another person in the shop and came back with a form after a final conversation with THEM.

He said “fill out your foreign address and phone number”

It was the normal Japanese form, not a special one for foreigners, so I did my best to make a US address fit in the fields and who knows if I’ll ever actually get any junk mail – the important thing is that he took the form, wrote some stuff on it, and handed me a point card.

Minor victory accomplished, it was time to eat.

Wikitravel’s Nagoya entry says that Nagoya’s signature food is something called misokatsu, and I figured that I would give it a try: I likes me some miso and I likes me some katsu, so the two together, how can that go wrong?

It took me a little doing to FIND somewhere offering Nagoya’s signature food. For a signature food, I sure looked at an awful lot of restaurants before finding one that admitted to making misokatsu, and it was a tiny tiny hole in the wall with chairs and tables that seemed small even for the Japanese frame. Sitting down, I came close to lifting the table off the floor with my knees.

I negotiated an order of misokatsu with the waitress and sat back to wait.

I noticed that, of the other 5 people to order between the time I entered and the time I got my order, four of them also ordered misokatsu, so Wikitravel seems to be right that those Nagoyans sure like their misokatsu. This was a good sign, I thought, temporarily forgetting that the Japanese eat a great many things that I do not consider food.

My lunch arrived, and it had a huge bowl of rice, a noodle dish, some pickles, some squash, and a carefully presented Katsu covered in a terrifying black sludge. I swear it looked like it wanted to leap from the plate, go straight through my eyes on its way to my brain, and turn me into a mindless puppet of my alien masters.

On the other hand, the cook was between me and the door, and I knew he had knives, so I tried it.

It was yummy. Thank heavens for that, I don’t want to think about how unpleasant the whole experience would have been otherwise.

Misokatsu enjoyed, I retraced my steps to the station, bought another ticket, and I was on my way to Osaka, Land Of The Murderous Bicycle Huns.

Or so it seems. None of them actually HIT me, but the crazy bikers of Tokyo have nothing on their Southern counterparts. When they’re not trying to kill you, they’re chaining their bikes to anything that will support a bike, regardless of the legality of the place they’re chaining the bike to. This means that the sidewalks get narrower because of all the illegally parked bikes, making the odds of a near miss even higher.

That vaunted Kansai courtesy? It vanishes once heel meets pedal.

I did eventually make it to Den Den Town, Patricia Martin’s Third Holy Place, and it was actually rather disappointing when I actually did find it. It’s got a huge Softmap, sure, and assorted other stores, but, well, I can see why my Osakan buddy likes going to Akihabara.

That’s not to say it’s not got plenty of places to drop your hard-earned yen, because it’s got those, but it doesn’t have the same infectious energy Akihabara does.

In order to have bought something, I picked up a cheap secondhand copy of Da Capo.　Now I can play through it and assure that the main character winds up with Kotori and not that bitch Neru.

Oh, the Softmap guy asked me if I had a point card. I didn’t even try; one success for the day is good enough.

Anyway, maybe it would have been better in midday, or if I’d been able to devote more time to exploration, but I was content to make my purchase and start looking for dinner.

Now, as Nagoya is known for misokatsu, Osaka is known for Okonomiyaki. This worried me; Okonomiyaki is one of those things where they give you a grill and a bunch of raw ingredients and tell you to have at it.

I came really quite close to giving up without even trying and hitting an Italian restaurant before I finally decided, what the hell, McDonalds is RIGHT THERE if I screw up my Okonomiyaki, there’s no shame in failure and plenty of shame in coming all the way to Osaka and eating Italian.

As luck would have it, the Okonomiyaki place I settled on must be the only place in Japan where they cook your Okonomiyaki for you, in front of you.

So I not only didn’t have to embarrass myself, I also got a demonstration for the first time I have to do it myself. It was, like the misokatsu, yummy, and also educational.

Tomorrow: Castles.

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What flavor IS maid?

Posted on June 14, 2008 by baudattitude

Important milestones in language learning:

Realizing, while purchasing the following, that I can ask, in Japanese, “What flavor is maid?”

The second important milestone was that I successfully resisted the urge to do so; Japan doesn’t need my bad jokes.

These things are all over Akihabara: proof that you can take about Y200 worth of cookies, put them in a cute box and sell them for Y600.

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What a way to wake up…

Posted on June 14, 2008 by baudattitude

Waking up in a strange bed is a pretty unsettling moment.

Waking up in a strange bed in Tokyo when you’re not expecting it is really quite terrifying.

My morning started like that, with a bit of sheer “where the hell am I?” panic. It’s gotten better, though.

The flight to Tokyo, now that I’m fully aware of where I am and have spent a full day roaming the city, was pretty decent. I’m getting used to the process: I get up godawful early to make a plane, spend an hour or two getting to Seattle or San Francisco, spend several hours reflecting on Douglas Adam’s “It is no coincidence that no language on earth has ever created the phrase “Pretty as an airport””, and then spend 9 to 11 hours on another plane slowly grinding its way across the Pacific.

It’s important to get on the plane and fall asleep pretty much immediately; this makes it so you’re almost on Tokyo time when you get there.

Just as I’m getting used to the flight, Japan seems to be getting used to me. The customs inspector flipped through my passport, commented on the multiple entry visas, and wished me a friendly “welcome back”, the front desk guy at the hotel thanked me for returning and didn’t even ask if I needed help finding the room.

The JR pass I bought for this trip is turning out to have been an awesome investment, by the way. It means slight delays at every station – I have to use the single manned ticket gate and can’t whip through the automatic turnstiles with my Suica – but it’s saved me Y5000 at least in train fare so far, and I got to take the Narita Express in from the airport instead of the slow train.

Getting to the hotel around 6PM last night, I had the bright idea of trying to go out and do stuff; this might have been a good idea if I hadn’t also squeezed in a much-needed bath and change of clothes. By the time I got to Ikebukuro, it was after 8PM and places were starting to shut down. I grabbed a chicken curry rice omelet and trudged back to the hotel to get some rest.

This morning started with the aforementioned moment of sheer terror, and as also aforementioned it got better.

First, I went off to Ginza to visit the Sony Building, which was full of shiny things I could not buy. The few things they DO offer for sale in their store there are all “overseas” versions – basically the same stuff I could get at a Sony store in the US. Very disappointing from a buy-stuff perspective, less disappointing from a “wow, neat shiny things” perspective. I got to watch a terribly perky saleswoman demonstrate a Rolly, and I am befuddled as to its popularity.

Then I went back to Ikebukuro, where all the stores were open, and hit up the Uniqlo for a bunch of T-shirts. Damnit, I put in an awful lot of effort to get myself down to the weight where I COULD wear a Japanese XL size, I’m going to buy some shirts. Uniqlo has a cool thing going where they have shirts based on Shonen Jump manga, so I wound up with a lot of shirts.

I thought about going into the Ikebukuro Animate, but then I walked over to the street it’s on.

The girls have taken over. That is to say, that part of town has been Otome Road for a while now, but when I was there a year ago, it was at least partially boy-themed stores mixed in with the girl-oriented stores.

It’s all BL and yaoi now, and the hordes of teenage Japanese girls crowding into the shops were, well, they were a MULTITUDE. Saturday being a school half-day, most of them were wearing their uniforms; this would have been a fantasy-fulfilling vision if it weren’t for, well, knowing what they were there to buy.

I made a quick exit. I’m all for equality in access to naughty manga, but actually seeing equality in action was more than a little intimidating.

I did get a cool sticker in Tokyu Hands. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually put it on anything, though. Nobody’s likely to be able to read it, and constantly having to explain what it says would take the humor right out of it.

So, Ginza and Ikebukuro visited, it was off to the first of Japan’s Three Holy Places: Akihabara.

My eternally suffering wife puts up with an awful lot, and her husband trotting halfway around the world to the Land of Fanboy Temptation is just one of the things she has to deal with. Her exact words were “don’t buy too many gadgets”, and my reply was “I won’t buy TOO MANY gadgets.”

I intended to buy one of the Crimson Red PSPs I saw on Kotaku a few months ago, and it turns out that this was surprisingly difficult, even in Akihabara.

Put this way: I saw multiple “Crisis Core” PSPs for sale, and that was a famously limited edition. I didn’t see a single red PSP.

The Crisis Core PSPs were in the $300 range. Presumably the red ones, if they could be found, would be that much or more. That’s a lot just to get another PSP. I was half thinking that I might be able to get out of Akihabara without breaking the bank.

Then I thought to myself “Hey, the hotel has free internet access and an ethernet jack in every room. Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up a cheap used laptop and blog from Japan?”

Used laptops are pretty available and pretty cheap in Akihabara; if you don’t mind that they have no warranty whatsoever and are probably going to have a completely dead battery, you can pick one up for under $200. It was looking like I’d had a pretty good idea.

Then I walked by a display for the Asus EEE, and, well, I was lost. I hadn’t gotten a chance to use one in person before, so I hadn’t gotten to see how cute it was and how surprisingly decent the keyboard and touchpad were.

I wound up dropping roughly $400 on the EEE. At least it runs Windows XP home and they include a USB optical mouse and 4GB SDHC card in that price, a US machine for the same amount comes with Linux and no accessories.

Oh, and they offer it in pink, but the last shreds of my manhood surfaced just in time to make me buy a white one.

I wanted to pay a return visit to Mai:lish, a maid cafe in Akihabara that’s remarkably foreigner-friendly, but they had a heck of a queue to get in.

I wound up, instead, at Cafe With Cat, the nekomimi-maid-themed restaurant in Comic Toranoana. Perv factor: very high. Food (I had beef curry): Not bad.

They serve it with your rice molded into the shape of a valentine heart, which I would call a touch over the top if it weren’t being served by a girl in a frilly maid outfit with cat ears. Really, once you’re there, there’s no more “over the top” to go to.

No pictures of the staff, sorry. You’ll just have to go there for the experience.

Oh, both Comic Toranoana AND the Akihabara Mandarake are pretty much given over to the girl themed doujinshi. So you have this male-fantasy-fulfillment cafe on the second floor of a building that mostly caters to girls now. It’s a little odd.

On the way out of Toranoana and headed back to the station, I realized that the crowd on the sidewalk was considerably heavier than normal, and then I realized that I was approaching the memorial that’s been set up for the victims of last weekend’s… I don’t know what to call it. Tragedy? That’s an over-used word. Sheer damned craziness is a better term; the whole thing is so non-Japanese that it doesn’t seem possible.

The memorial is a huge mound of bouquets and the crowd of people stopping to offer prayers is pretty intense, made the more so because the nearby shops seem to have considerably turned down the volume out of respect; it’s a small area of quiet and contemplation in the middle of the neon hurricane that is Akihabara.

I didn’t expect to walk past it and doing so shook me up a little. It’s not enough to make me feel unsafe here; this is still Japan after all, but I hope it stops here and that nobody decides to go copycat.

OK, serious moment over. Tomorrow I’m going to take full advantage of this JR pass and head off in the direction of Japan’s SECOND Holy Place: Osu in Nagoya. The shinkansen northbound is still out of service from this morning’s earthquake, but I’m assured that southbound is running just fine.

Posted in anime, Japan, nekomimi, vacation | Leave a comment

Life, Love, and the Acquisition of new hardware.

Posted on June 5, 2008 by baudattitude

My wife’s monitor died in explosive fashion, and as the wonderful person she is, she decided that she would take MY old monitor and allow me free reign to purchase a new one for myself.

This display of generosity came at an unfortunate time, however, since she waited a few hours between her monitor dying and telling me that I could buy a better one for myself… by that time, I’d already, uh, bought a better one for myself with the intention of giving her the hand-me-down, without, you know, checking with her that it was OK.

So I feel a bit like a heel, but at the same time I have a cool monitor now, so I’m a heel with a cool monitor anyway.
This being a Gateway FHD2400, which is a lovely shiny 24″ 1920×1200 monitor. Not that those stats are, in themselves, anything especially crazy, but this thing also goes way beyond the norm in terms of inputs – it’s got the standard DVI and VGA, of course, but also has S-video, Component, Composite, and HDMI inputs. For a guy with far too many old video game consoles around, this thing is just about perfect.

No picture because my desk is a horrific mess right now. It’s, uh, a big shiny monitor with chrome trim. I’ll let you envision that.

Filed under “organization” because it’s going to let me get rid of a 24″ Toshiba CRT TV that has the most annoying shadow mask in the history of CRT displays. It’s something I managed not to notice for a very long time, but once it was pointed out it became something I couldn’t unsee.
I hate that.

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Two weeks with Izuna

Posted on June 2, 2008 by baudattitude

Obviously I didn’t update the site much in May, for a few reasons.

1) With the term coming to an end, work at a bit of a high point, and a trip to Japan coming up later this month, “crazy busy” is a good description of May.

2) There’s been a bit of a return to the EQ addiction in the household. This is a bad thing, and will probably all end in tears.

3) I normally post something whenever I finish a game, and after abandoning Princess Peach, starting Yoshi’s Island DS, and giving up on that as a bad cause, I hadn’t finished anything until today.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in the enjoyable company of a certain young ninja girl. That being the titular character of “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.”

Honestly, if you’re my kind of person, you’ve probably already played it. Failing that, if you haven’t played it, hearing that there IS a game called “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja” has probably made you decide to play it. If at this point you still need to hear me say anything more, I’m questioning whether you’re really my sort of person.

I’ll mention one more point: The banker NPC, who you have frequent occasion to visit, is a cute shrine maiden with glasses.

If you’re not already checking eBay for a used copy, I’m done with you.

But I’ll continue.

Izuna is often described in terms of being old school and uncompromisingly difficult and in general people say bad things about how it’s nasty and unforgiving.

This is true, to a point. See, it’s basically a graphically spiffed-up version of the old Unix game “Rogue”, and that game is crazy nasty and unforgiving: you’re thrown into a dungeon, you have to survive against heavy odds, and you’re probably going to starve to death if the monsters don’t kill you first, after which you start over again at level 1 with no stuff.

Izuna, on the other hand, doesn’t need to eat, and if you die in a dungeon you don’t go back to level 1. It’s practically easy!

Yeah, you lose all your stuff and all your money, but after you finish the first dungeon, you have access to the aforementioned incredibly cute banker who is happy to keep your spare gear and cash on hand for the next time you slink back to town, naked and bankrupt.

So it’s hard, yeah, and the game does tend to pick the worst possible moments to throw vicious chains of enemies at you, but you’re always able to pick up and head back down into the dungeon for another round. This time around, you’re probably a couple-three levels higher and it’ll be easier; you might even get down to the boss – and if you’ve fought all the way down to the boss, you probably won’t have any trouble with them. I only had to fight one boss more than twice.

The dungeons are randomly generated, but all the normal things you’d expect apply: as you get lower, enemies get harder, treasure better, traps more frequent. You have seven dungeons to get through to finish the story, with an optional 8th dungeon that actually IS just as nasty and unforgiving as Rogue – which is, I assume, why it’s optional. If you’re crazy, it’s there to give you a challenge.

Getting through the seven not-optional dungeons and seeing the extent of the story was really challenge enough for me, so I’ve stopped there. I understand there’s a sequel coming out, which will probably be more of the same.

If that “more of the same” includes more cute girls in glasses, consider it a day one purchase.

Posted in nds, videogames | Leave a comment

A weird little memorium.

Posted on June 2, 2008 by baudattitude

A weird little memorium today.

Back in the early 90s, there was no such thing as cheap public internet access. If you were a student, or worked at one of a very few large corporations, you could get access, otherwise you were generally out of luck.

The flip side of this is that, if you did have access, you had something quite unusual and rather special. Even back then, before the growth of the web, internet access meant that you had access to ftp sites and USENET newsgroups and gopher and a great many things that you couldn’t get through local BBSes or pay services like Compuserve.

I was just a high school student at the time, so I shouldn’t have been able to tap in to any of this and probably shouldn’t even have known it was out there.

On the other hand, I had unofficial access to an account at the local university, and that’s where I got my first exposure to the net. It was pretty intoxicating, and I spent far too many hours sucked into the comp.sys.* newsgroups. It’s no exaggeration to say that my career so far is owed to having early internet access and being able to tap into so much information that wasn’t otherwise available.

That ended when the Vax I had access to an account on got shut down in 1991. It was a pretty harsh separation – not as crippling, to be sure, as being netless would be today, but… I’d had, for a few months, a window into a much larger world, one which was still out there, and now it was closed, blinds pulled, and boards nailed across.

Then, a few months later, I ran into someone with the virtual equivalent of a claw hammer.

That gentleman’s name was David Casti, a student at the local college, and he wasin charge of a machine there called VECTOR. He also didn’t mind creating accountsfor people who, well, weren’t necessarily students. Life was good again, and although it didn’t last, it wasn’t too much longer before Delphi started offering reasonably inexpensive internet access, and not too much longer after that before the growth of freenets, and really not too much longer at all before the thought of not having access to the internet was actually unthinkable.

I probably wouldn’t remember any of this, except that while I was doing a searchfor something completely unrelated on my machine today, I ran across the following message from June 2, 1992:

SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE

OK, so the end is really here. I cannot guarantee that VECTOR will be
on the network after 5:00 p.m. June 5. I expect that it will remain
until the afternoon of June 10, but I make no guarantees and I don’t
want any misunderstandings about this. If you have any questions,
contact me.

Many of you have asked about access through other UO machines. Much to
my surprise (and your dismay) I have FAILED to find anyone who will
allow me to transfer my users to their system. I was surprised to find
such close-mindedness on the part of the university, especially because
the reasons they give are so lame: not enough time or money &c.

So, feel free to leech the network away these last few days. Please be
mindful of disk space. Currently there are 20 free megabytes. If they
fill up, no one will be able to log on except me, and I will be forced
to delete (what may appear to you to be random) files. A good guideline
would be to keep your off-line storage down to 5M. While you’re logged
on, feel free to use the disk, but before you log off prune your user
space.

Please keep in mind that I’m not falling off the edge of the Earth, and
although I won’t be able to help with network access right away, I may
be able to at some future point. Also, I will be happy to help anyone
who may find other ways to get network access. My account on OREGON will
probably remain active for a term or two, so I can receive mail at
dise@oregon.uoregon.edu.

Thank you all for treating me so well. I was happy to have provided
access — I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer than a few months.

This service was provided (albeit unwittingly) by NeXT Computer and
the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon.
Without their support, none of this would have been possible.

INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERR

16 years later, I’m going to bet that VECTOR is long since scrap, and that David has long since graduated and is hopefully doing well in whatever endeavours he’s decided to pursue. This whole thing, in fact, seems a bit quaint – these days, net access is universal, nearly free, and as impersonal as paying your water bill.

That’s what memoriums are for, though, for remembering things that – while they may not seem all that significant today – made a difference at the time.

Posted in random | Leave a comment

Nintendo Hates Girls

Posted on May 13, 2008 by baudattitude

A foreword:

If you grew up with a NES, if some of your fondest gaming memories revolve around the frustrating-but-satisfying 8-bit classics, if you think “Nintendo hard” is a compliment:

Skip this post.  You won’t like it, and you’ll add a snarky comment detailing why you didn’t like it.  It’s even odds whether your comment will be from the OMG SAMUS ARAN IS TOTALLY A GURL DIDN’T YOU KNOW? camp or the LEARN 2 PLAY NOOB camp, but you’re unlikely to change my thoughts on the topic.

Original post follows:

I am relatively new to the Mario franchise.

I played Donkey Kong, of course, and Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros in the arcade, but, as I didn’t own a NES during its heyday, I never really joined the Cult of Mario.  I did own a SNES, but I bought the core system that didn’t have a bundled cartridge.

Later, when I bought a N64, I did pick up Super Mario 64, mostly on the hype – which actually explains most of the games I bought for that system – and didn’t really get it.  I ran around a bit and collected a few stars, got rather tired of it, and went back to Doom64 and F-Zero X.

Super Mario Sunshine likewise failed to hook me.

I don’t honestly know why I kept buying Mario games, except, well, I kept buying the hype.

Then I bought a DS, and once again bought into the hype, this time for New Super Mario Brothers, and suddenly I got where all the hype was coming from.  It was actually a really good game, albeit with a bit of an annoying save system, and I played through it and even went back to it to unlock a couple of worlds I hadn’t gotten to the first time around.

Following that, I played through the original Super Mario World on the GBA, and even branched out into the Mario RPG lineup with Partners in Time.

I was starting to become a Mario convert.

Then they released Super Princess Peach, which had a neat twist on the whole Mario-saves-Peach thing and got lots of good reviews that pretty much all said “It’s Mario, but, you know, for girls.”

Having played it, I can confirm that it is, in fact, Mario, but, you know, for girls, and also that Nintendo hates girls.

Let me explain how I’ve come to this conclusion.

Every Mario game has more or less the same premise.  Bowser needs to be stopped, Peach rescued, kingdom saved, that sort of thing.  This is accomplished by running from left to right across the screen, stomping turtles and mushrooms as you go.  Eventually you reach Bowser, defeat him, life is good again.

Pretty much every Mario game also includes a side quest where you collect Stuff.  Yoshi coins, stars, shines, blah blah blah, there’s some Big Shiny Things that you will naturally get a few of in the course of playing the game but REAL completists will get them all.

I’m not a real completist.  I want to beat Bowser and enjoy the good life until the next time.  So far, me and Mario have had a pretty good understanding about this.  I don’t collect all the stars and he doesn’t give me any grief as long as Bowser gets what’s coming.

Super Princess Peach, being Mario, but, you know, for girls, also has a collection side quest.  It involves freeing Toads.  There are three hidden in each level, but freeing them isn’t a condition of completing the level.  You can progress just fine without finding them, until you get to the last level.  That’s where your sentient umbrella pops up and says:

“Oh my goodness! I can feel a powerful force from within!  Before the final battle, you need to rescue all the Toads from past stages.”

To expand upon my annoyance with this:  By this time, you’ve jumped, swum, and umbrella-bashed your way through every level of the game.  Your name is spoken in hushed and fearful tones wherever sentient mushrooms gather to speak legends of the Destroyer, She Who Walks In Fire, The Pinkish Abomination, El Diablo Melocotón.  You are knocking on Bowser’s door, ready to show him that you’re standing by your man, damnit, and that you would like him back.

However, you’re not going to take that final step through the last threshold until you go back to Every Goddamn Level You’ve Already Beaten, and collect Every Goddamn Toad you may have missed.

In my Own Private Version of the Marioverse, this is the point where Peach points to Luigi, who she rescued in the previous world, and says to him “He’s your brother.  Let me know how it goes.” and goes home to catch up on her sleep.

This level of being an absolute jerk to the player isn’t present in any Mario games, you know, for boys, and so I come to my original conclusion.

Posted in nds, videogames | 7 Comments

One more off the list.

Posted on May 10, 2008 by baudattitude

Finished “Lego Star Wars II” last weekend, an experience that was, well, a bit of a downer.  The first game may be been based on the lesser movies, but it was a lot more fun.

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment