ダニエルの冒険

After talking to the staff at Yamasa, lunchtime was approaching and I had no idea of where anything was so some exploration was becoming necessary. I stepped out of the Yamasa building, holding my two maps, and confidently headed left. I walked through some small residential streets and eventually figured out that I wasn’t as sure about where I was as I thought I was. I asked a young salaryman where I was and he explained that I had gone the wrong direction altogether when I went left. I headed back past Yamasa and headed north towards the Seiyu Shopping Centre.

Map of Local Area I walked around the shopping centre briefly, looked at phones and food, and continued north toward KFC. I eventually got there, passing an arcade with “Exciting Game” and a sign saying “WELCOME IN” over the car park, and ordered some food which wasn’t very good at all and left most of it (not a very good thing to do in this country!) and headed for the shopping centre. I wandered inside and and walked the length of the ground floor. I noticed that around the clothes shops at the end of the building there were lots of very cute girls, and headed up one floor to where most of the clothes shops were and was totally blown away by the number of them (cute girls, not clothes shops). It’s a kind of overload: like when you really like chocolate cake and you think to yourself “I could eat all the chocolate cake in the whole world. I love cake so much that there’s no such thing as ‘too much cake’,” but then you buy a huge cake and start eating it and a few slices in you realise that even though you really love chocolate cake, there’s just so much chocolate cake walking around in hotpants and long socks that it’s impossible to take it all in.

In one shop there were a few Hime-gyaru and I was happy with myself that I could identify their fashion. Of course, at this part of the building there was nothing but clothes shops and girls walking around with their “cool” boyfriends. Most of them were going for the hip-hop look. Black people dressing hip-hop and asian teenagers dressing hip-hop are very different things. Most of them look like members of N*Sync back in the day, and some of the really hardcore guys look like clean-shaven, tattoo-less Fred Dursts (Japanese men don’t usually have facial hair, unless it’s ridiculously over-groomed, and tattoos are never done unless you’re Yakuza). I actually saw one guy with a backwards red cap. And a matching red tracksuit. And another guy was walking around with this huge diamond necklace thing. Really blingin’.

On the top floor, I went into Tower Records and left after I saw Jimi Hendrix in the pop section and a poster with Freddie Mercury which someone had drawn on to make him say something in the Kansai dialect, marketing his CD. Across from Tower Records was a huge instrument shop. At the entrance, there were various electric drum kits, and inside they had hundreds of stringed instruments from Fenders to Gibsons to ukuleles and a double bass. There were many pedals on display and I found the distortion pedal I have at home, along with every other pedal ever made by Boss. There was also a book with tabs for Rage Against the Machine, which is probably one of the most expensive bands to cover because of the crazy effects Tom Morello uses: wah-wah pedals, pitch-shifter pedals, kill switches… give Know Your Enemy a listen.

I walked back to the apartment and rested for a while, checking email and talking to some friends online. I wanted to sleep but decided the responsible thing to do would be to try to get some supplies so I headed east to the Feel News Shopping Centre. I had to ask for help finding things a few times and couldn’t figure out the soaps, but I spoke to Mizuki on Skype this morning and she suggested some brands for me which I saw yesterday, so I’ll be ok next time (ジョイ, joi, is the washing up liquid I’ll be getting). I got some salt, bread, butter, enormous apples (normal in Japan though), olive oil, a non-stick spatula, toilet/kitchen paper, eggs, and of course, Pocky. I decided to go with orange juice and milk over Qoo or Diet Coke.

I watched Nodame Cantabile and 「今日は渋谷で６時」 (today, at Shibuya, 6pm), a one-hour short-story which was chosen in the 19th Fuji TV “Young Scenario” competition. It just came out last night so I can’t give any information about it in English really, as far as links to websites go. It was really good anyway. It’s about 3 people who agree to meet various people online at 6pm in Shibuya, but get all mixed up. One guy is an Otaku and gets a date with a girl he knows from an MMORPG called 暴走天使 (“gang-angel”, I guess) in the game and Yukari in real life. Another girl, Kana, is really hungry so goes onto a dating site on her phone and arranges to meet a man to bring her out on a date so she can get free food. The last character is a middle-aged salaryman (大木, Oki) who is on a 闇サイト (dark-site), a recent phenomenon in Japan where sites have popped up which help people commit suicide. I suppose they’re similar to pro-ana sites in the west. The Otaku goes for a date with the Kana where she orders a lot of food (either €350 or €3,500 worth… I didn’t see how many zeros were on the register), and the suicidal salaryman meets Yukari, who brings him out to a club. Kana has some spray paint with her and decides to write on a shop’s metal screen while with the otaku, but writes over a tag by a local gang, led by a guy called Kae. Yukari turns out to be really bad-ass and was part of their gang, in disguise as a male. She kidnaps Kae to save the other couple and they keep him hostage, then realise that Oki’s going to kill himself so they run to the roof and save him, then they find out that Kae’s the leader, who they called Kae-chan (a suffix used for little girls). A whole lot of people get beaten up and people learn important lessons about life, and so on. It was pretty entertaining and apart from why in the world Kana had paint and decided to tag the shop, I understood most of it!