Rocking in Hakata

Awww…it’s Batman and the Joker from The Dark Knight, Agent Smith from The Matrix, and V from V for Vendetta as BE@RBRICKs. What’s a bearbrick? It’s kind of like what you could expect if you did a genetic Punnet square using a Lego man and a teddy bear. Oh, and then you attach a cell phone strap to the head, so you can use it as a charm. Cute? Hmmm…

Apparently you can collect bearbricks from 12 different franchises. There are 2 collectible bearbrick characters for both The Dark Knight and Superman Returns. Then there are single bearbricks available for The Matrix, V for Vendetta, The O.C., 300, Enter the Dragon, A.I., Happy Feet, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I only got my hands on these 4 from buying lunches with a soft drink at the supermarket over the last few weeks. They’re attached to Pepsi products, it seems. I must admit to being a bit curious about how similar the Willy Wonka character might be to the Joker…ha ha ha…come on, admit it – there are a few similarities; panache, purple and green clothing, pale face, a creepy grin…

Deas Customary Drivel, Media, Photos

Hey everybody – sorry for the radio silence lately. I’m in the midst of my heavy visitation schedule, and it wreaks havoc with blog access / posting. Also, I turned in my recontracting paperwork yesterday. If my job is not secretly cut from the prefecture’s budget and everyone still agrees that I’m cool, I’ll be here for one more year. Yay! I’m currently planning an overseas trip in March, an attack plan for my college loans, a complete redesign of this blog, and how not to catch influenza during my visitations. (It’s a freakin’ epidemic here! Teachers beware!) Ha ha. Anyway, I should be back to my customary drivel shortly.

Deas Customary Drivel

You may notice some weird stuff as I attempt to get Twitter working for me. Here’s my profile. I’ve just recently started thinking about a major overhaul to the blog. This is one tiny step forward. Gotta get my head around this stuff before a redesign is in the pipeline. Anyway, sorry for any inconvenience it causes. (I’m trying to catch up with the times! StumbleUpon and JapanSoc integration are also on the list.)

Deas Customary Drivel, 日本語

I went to the cleaner’s the other day to pick up a suit and had an interesting interaction with the shop lady. Once our actual business was out of the way and we were just chatting, she wondered if she might ask a favor of me. I welcomed the opportunity to be helpful.

She told me that she has had some trouble with the coin laundry she opened up on the other side of the grocery store. She finds dusty detergent spills around the machines. The machines do not require any detergent because they automatically dispense it during the wash cycle. (They automatically dose the load with softener, too.) She asked me to create a message in English that she could put on a sign for the foreigners she suspected of causing the problem.

That made me stop and think.

I wrote out a little note: “These machines automatically dispense detergent and softener. Please do not use your own. Thank you.” But then I said that I didn’t know how effective it would be. You see, the vast majority of the foreigners on our island work for the ship-building factories. They are usually from China, Brazil, or the Philippines, as far as I know. In short, English may not be the best choice here. It’s more likely to work for the folks from the Philippines, I think, as many of them have studied English as a second language extensively. (And hey, I’m not trying to paint the Chinese or Brazilian workers with a broad brush, here. So forgive the generalizations – it’s entirely possible that some or all of them are quite comfortable with English.)

Also – it may not be foreign folks at all. It could be an absent-minded Japanese customer just as easily. Putting detergent in is a mistake you make at the beginning of washing a load of laundry, right? And since lots of coin washes lock until the load is finished, undoing the excess could be impossible anyway, even if the patron noticed their mistake written in bold on the face of the machine after having shut the door. (I’ve not used this particular one, so I don’t know if it locks.)

Anyway, I told her that she should tell me if the problems keep happening, and if so, that I’ll contact some folks at the local international association for help making a nice, polite, multilingual sign to the same effect. But hey – it only works if people see it and pay attention to it, right? Ha ha.

Deas Customary Drivel, Unsolicited Commentary

So…Bill has posed the question – how will I make the most of my time in Japan? Well, the answer may not be the standard, but it’s true for a lot of people here – I’ll make the most of my time in Japan by getting out of Japan as often as possible. That’s right, folks, I’m all about international travel.

Being an ALT on the JET program is a unique opportunity. I’m young, much of my cost of living is subsidized – so I have some expendable income, and I have the ability to take chunks of vacation whenever the schedule has an opening. Also, I’m geographically much closer to a lot of places of interest than I was when living on the east coast of the United States. Most of Asia is just a hop, skip, and a jump away. I will likely never be in this situation again. I’d better make the most of it, no?

Some folks are far more serious than I am about travel, but I’ve still done my fair share. In my time here, I’ve been to South Korea, North Korea (technically…if you count 5 minutes over the line in the DMZ), Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Philippines. (Posts containing photos and video clips from each trip are available by searching around. Too many posts to link to here.) And I’m currently looking at a trip to Taiwan in March. Of course, I’ve done loads of travel inside Japan as well – again, far too much to even list.

I still want to go to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia*, India*, Russia, mainland China, Australia, New Zealand, and some other spots. But we’ll see. I might be able to knock out 1/3 to 1/2 of that list by the end of my stay here. If not, I’ll at least give it my best shot. That’s how I plan on making the best of my time in Japan. Other than financially saving as much as I can – yes, it’s doable even with travel expenditures – and improving my Japanese, that is.

*Providing they are safe enough for me to go.
** Yes, I borrowed the map from GraphicMaps.com, so sue me. Figured I shouldn’t erase their watermark if I was gonna use their image. Ha ha.

Deas Customary Drivel, JBMatsuri, RIH Entries, Trips, Unsolicited Commentary

It’s here! The last Philippines entry. I promise! Breathe a sigh of relief. Ha ha. I just wanted to break my bad habit about doing stuff and postponing actually posting about it for ages. I think I successfully did. This clip is enormous. It’s easily the longest blog-related video I’ve uploaded. It’s almost as long as my old student project, Beautiful Stranger, which came in at 15 minutes and 33 seconds. This one is 14 minutes and 6 seconds long – but that covers clips from 2 weeks of vacation! And when you consider that I culled it from about 35 minutes of footage total, all taken on my digital camera, it’s pretty concise. Ha ha. Fair warning! If you’re freaked out about the death of farm animals, skip from the 30 second mark to the 50 second mark – you don’t see anything, but you hear a pig squeal for a second, and then see it being roasted on the spit. No biggie. Highlights include Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer (the song, not the actual magical reindeer) on banjo and guitar at 2:20, tarsiers at 10:57, and the flamboyant transvestite python attendant explaining about Prony’s diet which consists solely of virgin / white pigs and also about the snakeskin bra and panty set at 11:16. In other words, the video is roughly chronological, but will still seem disjointed. Enjoy!

Deas Customary Drivel, Media, Trips, Video