do you know any famous japanese?
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Just returned from Tokyo, and I’m still recovering from jet lag. So sleepy… this won’t be a very coherent entry…
I didn’t really leave the Tokyo area since my trip was during the Japanese summer vacation, and most places (like Kyoto and Mt. Fuji) were booked solid. Not that I wanted to visit Mt. Fuji especially since I was just at Banff three weeks ago…
So most of the time my friends and I hung out at Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Tokyo, Akihabara, Yokohama, Chiba, Ueno, and Myorenji.
Harajuku and Shibuya are the two trendy hangouts for young Japanese people. There were tons of American-wannabe stores in Harajuku, and I found a place that sold University of Michigan T-shirts for ¥3500. Ouch! Shibuya is the slightly more expensive version of Harajuku, and it’s also where there are clubs and theaters and lots of cute girls.
Akihabara is the electronics town with a couple blocks full of electronics shops. The biggest Gamers and Animate stores are also in this area as well as smaller anime and videogame stores. I picked up quite a few things when I was here:
– Spirited Away R2
– I Can Hear the Sea R2
– My Neighbors the Yamadas R2
– VERSUS R2
– Red Dragon R2
– Ai Yori Aoshi OST 1
– Abenobashi Magical Shopping District OST 1
– Trick or Goblins Single
– Final Fantasy PRAY
– Final Fantasy 20020220
– Final Fantasy 6 Grand Finale
– Aa! Megami-sama Drama CD 1
– Chobits Navi Book
– Chii cell phone strap
– Shia cell phone strap
Most stores only stocked the newer stuff like Ai Yori Aoshi and Chobits, and I had to go to Virgin to find Yamadas. Older stuff like Love Hina and AMS could only be found in used CD/DVD stores. Found a complete AMS R2 DTS box for ¥8800 at one. A complete Love Hina box was around ¥50000.
Most places, I found, were overpriced by American standards. A typical DVD was ¥5000 and a CD ¥2000. Food was in very small quantities… if you didn’t know where or how to eat.
The weather was blistering hot when I was there. 95+ with 100% humidity. I was constantly sweating when I was outside… I’m not sure how the Japanese can wear long pants in such a weather. The typical Japanese male is expected to wear shoes, socks, and long pants all the time, so it’s easy to spot the Asian gaijins just because they’re wearing shorts, sandels, and a tank top. It’s 101 in San Jose today, but because there’s no humidity, it feels so much cooler than Tokyo.
Japan also has so killer cell phones, and most people seemed to carry around 2. One person I talked to in a train had two 3G phones — one was capable of playing Super Mario Bro on it. All of the phones I saw were about the same size as my Nokia 8000-series except they were flip phones with a color LCD as large as my Nokia faceplate. Most people seemed to use the phone more for webbing and e-mails than for actual phone calls, and a typical phone runs about ¥30000. It makes me both upset and jealous that cell phones in the US are so far behind.
