(Austin) On wednesday I have no classes. Super lucky right? Well, on Wednesday Nov 3 a bunch of of decided to get together for Karaoke. We went to our typical karaoke place, Ring-Hirakata.
For 3 hours (with membership card) it is only 400 Yen. やすい！(yasui) (it means cheap).
Our group consisted of Elijah, Nygel, Misato, Rina, Yusaka, Georgia, Tomohiro and myself. Yusaku, Georgia and Tomohiro had to come a bit after we started due to classes. We met at school around 5pm and started our session at Ring around 5:30pm. We stayed until like 9:30, which is more than 3 hours, so we had to pay 600 yen instead of 400. Still cheap!
It was a TON of fun. We actually took pictures this time, so I'll drop those near the end of the post. We sang a bunch of Disney songs this time including:
Ali Ababwa. (Aladdin)
I sang this one. Nigel chimed in some.
You'll be in My Heart (Tarzan)
Sang by Elijah, I chimed in some.
The Colors of the Wind (Pocahontas)
Sang by Georgia and I.
And of course. You know we -HAD- to do it.
Yes. Frozen reared its head.
Let it Go (Frozen)
Sang by Elijah and I (but also by everyone there)
There were, of course, a few other Disney songs and many many non-Disney songs. It was a ton of fun and I can't wait to go back.
After Karaoke, we all went down to Takebashi Ramen which is about a 2 minute walk from Ring. Delicious as always.
Here are the pictures taken that night.
I rolled some dice when we paid and won something from the cabinet.
(Austin) On Sunday Nov 1, we had tickets to go see FLOW, a Japanese J-pop/Rock band in Osaka.
Osaka. AGAIN. 3 times in 3 days we went to Osaka.
My wallet was crying.
I met Elijah and Taka, another Japanese friend of ours, at Hirakatashi station. Another friend of ours, Haruka, was going to come too. She bought a ticket and everything. However, she was sick, sick enough that she missed an exam the same day, so she couldn't come. T'was a bummer :/
So, we left from Hirakatashi station and went to Umeda. Umeda was exactly the location that the concert was at, but we wanted to go to the JUMP store. For those of you who don't know, there is a popular manga magazine in Japan called Shonen JUMP. Anyways, we went just to look around. After going to NipponBashi the previous day, we had pretty much seen all the good stuff currently out. Elijah and I both did get a pin for our backpacks from a series that we follow.
Afterwards, we left the JUMP store and headed towards Osaka University of Commerce, which is where FLOW was playing.
I doubt many of you know FLOW, but they are a pretty famous band in Japan, especially for doing Anime openings. Their most famous song is probably Go!! which was used as the opening song for Naruto.
A few examples of their work:
Colors (Code Geass Opening)
Days (Eureka 7 Opening)
World End (Code Geass R2 Opening)
The concert was simply amazing. It wasn't a HUGE amount of people like it was when we went to the Man With a Mission concert. The concert was held in the school gymnasium, but it wasn't even half filled. I can't really explain it other than saying it was amazing.
They played 2 new songs and announced that they would be playing the opening for yet another anime, this time Durarara!! x2 Ketsu.
After the concert we all headed home for some much needed rest from this very busy weekend.
Except for me. I had homework to do. Got about 3 hours of sleep that night.
(Austin) On Saturday, Halloween day, Elijah, Georgia, Yusaku, Nygel and I met up at Hirakatashi Station. We had lunch at a nearby Mos Burger. They specialize in Rice Burgers, but I had a normal burger instead.
After lunch, we said goodbye to Nygel who was going to the second day of the Kansai Gaidai festival. Elijah, Georgia, Yusaku and I departed for a place in Osaka called Nippon Bashi. There are 2 big meccas of Anime and Manga stuff in Japan. The most famous and largest one is Akihabara in Tokyo (We will be going in December). Nippon Bashi is the west side of Japan's version of Akihabara; "Akiba in the East, 'Ponbashi in the West"
It is smaller than Akihabara, but still lots of fun...and money consuming :0
A map of Nippon Bashi
We took 2 trains and some walking to actually get to Nippon Bashi. Wasn't that bad though. We immediately started going into different stores, taking pictures....and buying stuff.
We went into a LOT of shops. We spent atleast 8 hours in this place and there was still more to see.
However, there was one store in particular that sold wallscrolls of original art pieces. If you don't know what an wallscroll is, I'll post an example of two that I bought. Anyways, this store was amazing. Every art piece was an original, meaning it wasn't a derivative of a pre-existing anime or manga. In a place like this, that was simply amazing. And expensive. Upstairs in the same building we found that actually -original- art pieces that were the originals for the wallscrolls. These pieces were anywhere from 1500$ to 5000$. I wanted them. Badly.
At around 6pm, Yusaku and Georgia bid us goodbye and they headed home. Elijah and I, however, stayed much longer. We visited shops until it was super dark, our feet hurt and we were starving, so we decided that we had spent enough money in the shops to last until December and headed back to Hirakatashi.
Once again, we ate at our favorite restaurant, Takebashi Ramen. Seriously, this place is great.
I took a picture of this just to show a bunch of different character figures.
There are a TON of shows here.
Upstairs in one of the buildings that we were in had this huge model tank.
It is bigger than like 3 of my heads, easy. I would have taken more pictures of the other models like this but I saw they had a "do not take pictures sign"
The following are things that I bought.
This the wallscroll that I bought. It is intensely color and I really like it.
This is the wallscroll that Elijah and I bought together. Great for halloween!
Of course no trip to a place like NipponBashi would be complete without buying buttons and pins!
...and here they are on my bad. I -might- have a problem :p
They are stylized as Senbonzakura (千本桜) which means "One Thousand Blooming Sakuras"
The video which these outfits are based upon is here: Video
This is a small horizontal poster containing many of my favorite vocaloids.
This is another small horizontal poster with the same vocaloids, stylized different.
I don't really like this one as much, but it came from a random drawling so oh well.
T-shirt with Hastune Miku on it. Not sure if it is for me or someone else. *Shrug*
This is a nendo of Senbonzakura Hastune Miku.
Really good nendo actually.
Okay friends, that is all for part 2. Part 3 will be out soon to describe our trip -back- to Osaka on Sunday to the FLOW concert.
(Austin) The weekend of Halloween was quite eventful. Kansai Gaidai had its annual School Festival on the Friday and Saturday of Halloween weekend (30th and 31st). This is an event that all the Japanese students have been preparing for for months. We often see large groups of kids dancing in front of the huge windows on campus practicing.
That being said, there were many food stands setup by students. professional bands came, and it was in general a very active energetic event. We went to the festival on the Friday the 30th.
I grabbed a few photos as we walked around. Sorry, these aren't the best of quality and don't really show the full festival. I took these as we were leaving. Again, sorry :o
The best part, for me, was the A-Capella singing. The skill of these students was truly amazing. And it wasn't just Japanese songs either, they also did songs from Disney movies like Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid. The Japanese school curriculum has classes and instruction for music and vocals, starting from elementary school. And it shows. These kids were great.
As I mentioned earlier, in the months leading up to this students had been practicing dancing so I captured some videos for you to see. They're pretty good in my opinion.
After a few hours we were invited by our friends Yusaku and his girlfriend, Georgia, to go to Umeda, Osaka to go to a bookstore (Bookstore: 本屋, pronounced: Hon-ya). So, we left the festival, took a bus and 2 trains, and arrived in Umeda. After a brief walk, we got to the the bookstore. Sorry, I didn't take any more pictures of the building. The bookstore was 7 floors high with an additional floor below ground. While Georgia and Yusaku went upstairs (Yusaku really wanted to look at the English Grammar books), Elijah and I went downstairs to the Manga (Japanese Comics) section.
After looking around for a long time, we decided to buy 4 different series. I bought 3 books, Log Horizon Vol.1, ReLIFE Vol.1, and No Game, No Life Vol.1. Elijah bought Nisekoi Vol.1 and No Game, No Life Vol.1. They are in Japanese, so we are going to try and translate them by hand :)
I did take a few pictures of stuff I recognized inside.
Great manga called Boku no Hero Academia
Translates to My Hero Academia. Poster is announcing its new Anime adaptation.
One-Punch Man. Also another great manga.
Poster is, once again, announcing its anime adaptation (it is great btw, go watch it if you like anime!)
This is a manga series that I've yet to read called A Certain Scientific Accelerator.
It is a spin-off from A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun.
No idea what this is from, but it is great. Yes, that is a dry-erase board.
MR. SKELETON MAN WILL RULE THE WORLD.
This is a -huge- book, from what little I could see of the inside it seems to have maps and descriptions of the world that OVERLORD takes place in.
After we bought out books, we went and ate dinner. We went to a bar where all food items cost 300 yen (CHEAP) and you can continually order. Food was great. A picture of it is shown below.
Afterwards we went home. Thus ends our escapades on Friday. Saturday's adventures will be posted in Part 2.
(Austin) I want to preface this by saying sorry for the lack of updates lately. School has been pretty busy and I recently started a few new personal programming projects, so when I -did- have free time from school, my time was consumed by that. The posts over the next few days will be playing catch up on these 2-3 weeks of no posts.
With that said, here are some videos of the Aki Matsuri (fall festival) that Elijah posted about already here.
As a note, something went wrong when recording these videos, so there is no audio. I am sorry :/
This features the festival's Danjiri, a special Box, pushed by the locals that contains the local "Kami", or God.
Another video about the Danjiri, this time focused on the dancing.
Sorry about the late post, but last weekend we went on a field trip to Korea Town and a Japanese festival called Aki-Matsuri. For those of you unaware of the Japanese language Aki means fall and matsuri means festival though it is talking about a much different experience than one would find in America.
Our trip began like this: Large group of foreigners lead by our equally as foreign Culture and Every day Life in Japan teacher (though he speaks basically fluent Japanese) met up in front of the CIE (center for international education) building and headed to Hirakata-shi station. We boarded a train taking us to Kyōbashi station where we would switch train lines to take us to Tsuruhashi station. From Tsuruhashi station we walked to the two shrines that would be hosting the festival later that night. After taking a look at the shrines we walked a short distance to what is finally known as Korea Town. Korea Town was a very different place from what I am used to seeing in Japan. It was very interesting to see an entirely different culture stuck in the middle of a Japanese city, but most importantly we got to meet the kimchi terminator. After exploring Korea Town for a while it started getting dark and we went back to the area where the shrines were and where the festival was starting. Inside the shrine there were many booths set up where you could buy food or play small carnivalesk games that are popular in Japan. Not long after we got back to the shrine we heard the Danjiri nearby and people started gathering on the road to see. The tradition of the Danjiri is that the god of the shrine is placed inside the Danjiri for the duration of the festival and carted around the city. It was a very different experience than anything I've ever seen in America, but it was a lot of fun and the community in the area was very prominent and even though we were foreigners we were very welcomed to participate and enjoy the festival right along with the residents of the town.
