Now that I have officially decided to leave Japan this year, it is finally time for me to sort out my Japan Bucket List. This is basically a list of things I want to do before I return to the UK. Given my procrastinating nature, even the very act of making the list has been difficult. Before I knew it, it has become too late to do some of the stuff that I would have loved to. Things like watching or even taking part in Yukigassen and visiting the Sapporo Snow Festival are now impossible. There are even some things on there that I know in my heart of hearts were impossible in the first place. It has long been a dream of mine to steal a train driver’s hat as he sticks his head out of the window when a train leaves the station. That is nothing but a pipe-dream from the very beginning though.

The first item on my bucket list to be chalked off was much easier to achieve. Kalk Zamen Kuri no Hana is, in my opinion, Shiina Ringo’s greatest album and therefore the best album ever recorded. Not an easy listen but certainly one that rewards you one hundred fold if you take the time to get into it. KZK just oozes a kind of class unusual for a J-Pop star. Heck, unusual for any pop star  Hell, unusual for a musician. Of course, it didn’t achieve the mainstream success that her other albums before and since did, so unlike her other albums from this period there has never been a vinyl reissue of it.

As a result, it has become pretty rare. Despite half heartedly searching for in for the last 3 years, I never saw it in the used record shops I would waste time searching. So, after finally putting down the money for a Yahoo Auctions account (Japan’s far worse version of ebay, which you have to pay extra to bid over 5000 yen). I finally found what I was looking for.

For the cost of a cool 8000 yen I picked this up. And just look at it, it’s a thing of beauty.

The musical treat contained within is not betrayed by the packaging. As the album is very Japanese in its construction the cover’s spine is on the right rather than the left. Pure class!

Inside is a selection of the sheet music in gold plus bonus English Lyrics of Stem, odd since the English language version of this song doesn’t appear in the album.

The records themselves aren’t so exciting but the lyrics sheets are super nice.

Lovely Ringo on one side, turn them over for lyrics on the other.

 As a special Bonus, here are the lyrics to Poltergeist, which is probably my favourite Shiina Ringo song (at least it is today).

And how does it sound? Well, like most LPs compared to it’s digital brethren it has a more woolly sound. Maybe it is because of the reduced sound quality but this version just feels like it envelops you in a way my iPod doesn’t. I can’t really judge the audio quality though. I’m far from an audiophile and my setup is blatantly not the greatest.

This version of the album also has a bonus song at the end and taken on it’s own merit Ichijiku no Hana is truly beautiful and lovely. But appearing at the end of this album it is a bit odd. It kind of spoils the already epic conclusion to the album and it’s original last song. It’s like that bit in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when A Day in the Life finishes and there is some strange warbling just after (except not as bad) . Apparently Ringo wrote this song for this album but cut it out. Maybe someone wanted to add it here as bonus but it spoils the flow a bit.

One thing I did forget about listening to LPs is that you have to  switch sides part way though. On a double album like this one, with only 3 songs a side, I am only just comfortable on my bed before I have to get up and turn it over. Which is super annoying. These days we really are pampered with 1000s of songs in our pockets.

And what of the other items in my list? Well, you will hear about them soon enough….

Go to any town centre or shopping district these days and it is almost certain that people will try to give hand you things. Not useful things mind you, I’d love to walk down the road and for someone to hand me a free TV but no, take any trip to the town and you will have had tons of paper thrust in your face.

Leafleting is annoying, there is no getting away from that. 90% of leaflets handed to you are for things which are not at all interesting, so many people’s reaction to leafleters is to ignore them and hope they leave you alone as you pass. It is no fun for the poor people leafleting either. In fact as I read in (or more accurately, a friend read and told me about) the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness, he says that it is good to take a single leaflet from them so they can get their job done quicker. Making a small sacrifice like that will allow the leafleter that little bit more happiness. Having people constantly ignore you is no good for the soul and I guess they would quite like to be able to hand out all that paper so they can get out of the cold.

But what if picking up a leaflet was not a sacrifice, what if you could actually make it beneficial to take what is being handed out. Companies have tried to do this by including money off vouchers but if the service is not something you think you’d be interested in, why pick up a voucher for it?

Some time ago, back in the mists of time, Japanese companies hit upon the solution and I’m shocked that the idea has not caught on elsewhere. Often when handing out flyers, little packs of tissues are included. Of course, tissues are ALWAYS useful. It’s a rare day when people aren’t happy to receive a free pack of tissues.

So if people pick up your tissues they will probably look at your little leaflet for at least a couple of seconds longer that just a sheet of paper, the leafleter will be about to stop earlier because people will take what they are handing out and everyone will be more aware of your business. Everyone wins.

Unless you are Kleenex, no one needs to buy packs of tissues in Japan.

If you watch British telly you will be under the misunderstanding that F1 in Japan is all silly hats and cosplay.

Well, there is a lot of that but going to the Japanese Grand Prix I got talking to people and learnt there are a few more things going on around the sport.

Actually I didn’t learn too much because I was mostly talking to other foreign types at the beer tent but would I did learn rocked my world.

Ask any Brit what “the F1 song” is and you will always get the same answer, Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain. It’s a song that is forever linked with F1 for British fans and for those in the other countries that got BBC coverage (i.e. there rest of the English-speaking world)

Japan is not part of the English-speaking world though and got its own song. Truth by a Japanese Jazz fusion band called T-Square has a bit of a different feel to The Chain but it works and the CG intro is nicely put together.

These days the song has been retired but it is miles better than just playing American Idiot by Green Day like Japanese TV did for its F1 intros last year. It also doesn’t stop T-Square from playing a concert at every Japanese Grand Prix either.

That’s it for F1 and music but what about F1 and manga? Everyone knows that the Japanese love manga, they also love their F1, so it is only natural that there is an F1 manga out there. Grand Prix Heaven (Guranpri Tengoku) is a 4 panel manga (US comic style basically) that has been running in an F1 magazine called F1 Newsflash (F1 Sokuho) for the last 20 or so years. The manga is by a fellow called Fumio Murayama who doesn’t seem to have any other manga of note under his name. As a result of the magazine this thing is serialised in only F1 fans know about it, that is fine though, only F1 fans would get any of the jokes.

The strips all parody the various events, stories and controversies going on in F1 at the time. The writer also injects some interesting personalities to the drivers and people around the pit garages, his versions of F1′s various heroes and villains can be very different from the British public perception of these characters. The collection of strips I picked up from Suzuka this year were all taken from the 1999 and 2000 seasons. I ended up seeing running gags such as Mika Hakkinen’s scary wife, Ron Dennis constantly giving David Coulthard the cold shoulder by closing a curtain on him and Heinz-Harald Frentzen acting like a woodpecker.

Here are a few of the strips (keenly translated by me), I hope they bring back a few memories for the F1 fans amongst you:
(Remember! They read right to left!)

One last thing:
(Not entirely sure what it is but thought I’ll show you anyway)

I don’t know about you but I don’t go to the cinema very often. It’s just so expensive these days. It is very rare that I really want to pay so much just to see something on a big screen surrounded by crashes and bangs. Since 3D got popular, it has only gotten worse. The last thing I want to do is pay more for an over-hyped special effect which at best is unnecessary and at worst distracting.

Most of the time I only go to the movies to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster, which means having to endure (and paying extra for the privilege of wearing) those 3D glasses but it does give me the relief of understanding everything in the film. In Japan dubbing foreign films is not so popular, even with animation, so non-Japanese films appear in their original language which 9 times out of ten will be English.

I can happily sit in the cinema for a couple of hours, turn my brain off and enjoy some vacuous entertainment the way Hollywood wants me to. The only distracting thing is the presence of Japanese subtitles which you can’t help but try to read during a film’s duller moments (or in the case of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the whole damn film). In 3D movies the subtitles annoyingly jump out at you as well, making them even more in your face, literally.

However when I want to see a Japanese film, I would prefer to see those subtitles that seem like such an annoyance when watching films in my native tongue. Thus with Japanese movies, despite living in Japan, I generally have to wait for some sort of American DVD release before I can watch them. There are some films though, generally adaptations of things from other media that I love, which I just have to see NOW. Thus I have been to the cinema a few times to sit there straining away, trying to work out what is being said while all around me sit there all relaxed munching on popcorn.

The feeling I get from other people and, to be honest, deep in the dark recesses of my own heart is that people would rather not pay expensive cinema prices to sit in a dark room and have incomprehensible words played at them at high volume. I think there is a bit of a fear there and I can say that the few Japanese movies I’ve seen at the cinema are all remakes of stories I know well anyway.

You can count those films on less than 1 hand too, the two Evangelion remakes, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Rurouni Kenshin. Watching them has been very unique and eye-opening experiences.

I watched the first Evangelion film a long time ago and went in with no delusions that I would actually understand anything. I hadn’t been studying Japanese for very long and was just along to watch the pretty colours and flashing lights projected on the screen. There was very little different from the tv show that I had watched an obscene number of times so I knew everything that was happening even if I didn’t understand what they were saying.

The 2nd Eva film played havoc with my expectations however. I left the theatre pretty proud of myself, happily declaring that I had understood 70% of it despite them deviating from the TV series in some ways. I also marvelled about how unexpected these changes were, especially when they switched around characters and had me thinking they had killed an important cast member off. That had caught me totally off guard and I was so shocked. It was only when I watched an English subtitled version of it that I realised they had flat-out said that the character would be there two scenes before hand AND that she wasn’t dead just in sick bay all along. I felt like a right fool and watching the English translation made the film worse in my eyes. They should have kept it a secret until the last-minute and they should have made it seem like they had killed that girl off, it would have been so much better.

With Phoenix Wright, the first part stuck close to the original story, so I took it all in my stride and enjoyed it. The finale of the film took place in a court room, with all the specialised words that entails, coupled with the fact that it differed from the game quite a bit by the end. I was completely lost as the credit began to roll.

It felt like the end had dragged on for ages and as a result I did not enjoy it as much as I could have. The fact that the English version of the game it was based on changed all the names of the characters didn’t help me keep track of who was who either.

And so, 800 words into this post, I finally get to the reason I’m writing this. Last week I saw the Rurouni Kenshin movie. I thought it was as about as good as a live action anime adaptation can be. All the actors cast looked and acted the part, there was a nice mix of playing it mostly realistically with the odd impossible moment.

Before I watched it I was wondering how it could tell all of the first third of the (rather large) Kenshin story in one movie. In the original, the stories were told one after the other but in this film it had them happen concurrently and it weaved the various tales together well. Sure, they cut out one fan favourite character but replaced him with another to make up for it. Kenshin is an anime that I really loved when I first watched it and there is even a flashback scene that is almost shot for shot the same as in the Kenshin OVA, which I thought was a nice little bit of fan service for those that know its significance.

I thought the film was wonderful and I felt that I had understood a large chunk of it, I have been studying Japanese for a good 5 years now after all and I know the original story pretty well. I am eager to watch a translated version of the film to find out if I understood the plot correctly or I just made assumptions based on educated guesses.

Finally, I have to mention the best reason to go to the cinema in Japan, the anti-piracy message that plays before the film. The camera may be doing something illegal but he sure can dance!

I’m sure that many odd things have been seen through the windows of trains. Houses usually pass by so fast but often odd things can be seen from the corner of the your eye and your imagination fills in the rest. One such thing happened to me and caused me to doubt my sanity back when I first came to Japan.

On the ever crowded Odakyu Line, between Tsurukawa and Tamagawagakuen-mae, though the throng of people, I spied a strange house that looked like it was straight out of the film Laputa: Castle in the Sky. In that movie, the titular flying castle had a very interesting look. It was all overgrown and organic looking buildings. Not the kind of thing you expect to see in your usual Japanese town.

It took me about 2 years to believe it was actually there, any local I asked about it refused to admit the thing’s existance. As though it was some sort of conspiracy. Not only did it look like something out of a film but also like some sort of future house. You know, the houses they used to talk about on Tomorrow’s World. The ones that either had too many windows or none at all, or maybe they looked like a tree or some sort of cave.

The one you can spy from the train tracks is more the later. It looks like some big concreate dome with some sort of weird crow’s nest at the top. The design is all curvy and windowless, with little port holes at the bottom.

There is a university close by, so I assumed it was some sort of mad lecturer’s experiment. The other day, however, I finally walked up and took a closer look at it and found that this may not be the case. It appears to be inhabited like any other regular house.

So I have to ask you…. Why is it there? What does it do? Are people actually living there? Why are their barely any windows? What is going on?

Please internet, help me solve this mystery.