Caramelldansen our way around Japan

[rallamajoop]

Back in Australia! Better yet, back in the Perth part of Australia, with no plans to do anything particularly exciting for at least a week. Which ought be something of a relief by now (given that between Japan, Melbourne and all that other stuff I've been solidly busy for almost last month) if only it hadn't all been totally AWESOME, totally worth it even despite all the stress, and if I wasn't missing Japan already. Being back also means I'm looking forlornly at the horrible backlog of LJ posts I meant to make before I left - plus the new Japan ones - and it's gotten to the point where it's going to start competing with my fic WIP list if I let it get much worse. In no particular order, this is what's on it:

Japan: The Guilty Gear report
Japan: The Squeenix report
Melbourne: The Amaranth Ball
Melbourne: Manifest (day 1)
The World Ends With You, Thoughts on, + rather extended critique of the ending
Guilty Gear: That Post On Recent Canon I Have Been Putting Off Since April Sometime

Not including about 10 GB of photos that need to be sorted through, and where appropriate cleaned up and posted. BUT at least I can count on pinneagig's awesome photoshop skills to help with that part. For now I'm just going to leave all the photos and fannish stuff aside for the moment and talk about the actual trip for a bit. And maybe elaborate on just exactly what I was on about in that last post.

One of the things about living in somewhere as isolated as Perth (and I do like living here even if this city was built on the far side of nowhere) - is that most of the other places you're ever likely to go are going to be bigger and more exciting. On the flip side, I don't think I'd want to live in Japan long term. Between the education system, all the racism and sexism and the massive pressure everyone there seems to live under that country is seriously crazy and not just in the good way. But I would not at all mind getting to live there a bit more on the short to medium term scale. They've got fantastic shopping, great food, a railway system that can get you just about anywhere and runs on time, are quite obviously the holy ground for the anime fan, and there is something very neat about being able to walk down any regular, commercial city street and find pretty little ornamental shrines sandwiched in between the buildings here and there. The Japanese fit a casual version of all their old Shinto/Buddist spirituality in with modern life as if there's no contradiction there at all, and I really do like that.

Vending machines, as noted many times before, are everywhere; but mostly they don't sell anything more exciting than cold drinks, a few hot drinks and occasionally cigarettes. Soft drinks of the kind we'd recognise are surprisingly rare though. Coke shows up only occasionally, lemonade is almost unheard of and Fanta will be in grape flavour only if you see it at all. Instead, along with mineral water and assorted tea or coffee, what they sell are non-carbonated lemon drinks which, in a country where fresh fruit and vegetables are rare and expensive, seems to be where the Japanese people get nearly all their vitamin C requirements. Many have captions saying things like "Contains the vitamin C of 70 lemons" or "contains 1000mg of vitamin C", or similar promises at concentrations that I'm sure must be toxic for a lot of other healthy chemicals out there in the world. This quickly became the sources of a lot of jokes about "With The Power of 1000 Lemons!" that made its way around our group. That said, most of those drinks are actually pretty nice, and we were pretty grateful for them by the second week once the Violet Plague had started to spread. But more on that later.

The culture shock factor ambushes you in the oddest places, one of the odder ones being the humble Japanese bathroom. On my last trip to Japan my sister had to explain an odd device called the 'otto hime' (lit: ‘toilet princess’, I kid you not) which is a button you will find on the side of some public toilets which makes a sound like the toilet flushing when pressed. Now why on earth would anyone want to make the sound of a toilet flushing? Apparently, it's because a lot of girls in Japan are awfully touchy about the thought someone might be listening to them pee, and would keep pressing the actual flush to make enough noise to drown out whatever they were doing. The otto hime buttons were eventually installed to save water. If that doesn’t tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the Japanese mindset then I don’t know what would.

But I think I must have forgotten the part where finding the real flush button can present such a ridiculous challenge. It would be going a bit far to say no two toilets in Japan flush the same way, but there are far too many variations for comfort, and whenever you think you've got them all figured out they spring another one on you. Some have a button on the wall, which is inexplicably covered by a big metal cover on a hinge. Quite a few have a high-tech sensor somewhere you have to hold your hand over for a few seconds. Plenty have some kind of button or lever on the top or back of the toilet itself, but if it's obvious that it is a lever at all and not some random metal appendage or how exactly you're supposed to press it than you're pretty lucky. That's not counting all the other various twisty knobs or the one that had the button on the floor. The squat toilets were a whole other kind of challenge that most of us avoided like the plague.

Then there's the bath/shower attachment from many hotels, which also took a few tries to get the hang of. It's not so different from what you'll encounter in Western bathrooms - there's a shower, and a sink or a bath, a hot tap and a cold tap and a lever you turn to select whether the water comes out in the shower or in the sink. Only it's not so simple as that, oh no - in Japan, you're more likely to find that the lever won't stay on the shower setting unless you've already turned the taps on, then turned the lever, and if you're very unlucky, you might have to find the button on the shower attachment to press before turning the lever, and even if there are instructions on the wall somewhere you can bet they're not going to be in English...

It's like taking an IQ test every time you step into the bathroom. I'm not kidding.

Finally, there's the good old language barrier, which fortunately didn't get me too bad because our party included three fluent Japanese speakers who were very good about playing translator for the rest of us. I have a pretty good command of Japanese for someone who's done very little official study (according to jaseroque, freakishly good), but the downside of learning most of your vocabulary from shonen manga is that it doesn't apply so well to, say, talking to waiters or shop assistants. One thing that was hugely useful over there was knowing katakana. Very quick Japanese lessons: the Japanese have three alphabets, hiragana (phonetic letters used for most words), katakana (similar to hiragana but used for stuff like emphasis - think of them like capitals), and kanji (complicated symbols borrowed from the Chinese and the bane of every Japanese student who ever lived). The handy thing about katakana is that it's also the alphabet the Japanese use whenever they're writing words they've borrowed from a foreign language, and they've borrowed a metric crapload of words from English, so if you catch sight of katakana on a sign anywhere and have the basic knowledge to sound it out, odds are at least 10/1 it'll be a word you can recognise. This is something I learned to appreciate really quickly back when I was teaching myself the Japanese alphabet by translating the writing on all our assorted dragonball merchandise (so not kidding about that one either).

So it was a bit of a surprise to realise that I'm pretty unique with my katakana love, since almost everyone else who's ever learned Japanese has done so from textbooks where katakana only crops up very occasionally, and hate that particular alphabet with a passion that only kanji can surpass. Seriously people, if you're going to Japan and only have time to pick up one alphabet before you leave, make it katakana - it may not seem that common, but if you want to know whether the brownish drink in the bottle in the vending machine is coffee or tea, a little basic katakana knowledge is invaluable.

But enough generalising, time for some actual trip specifics. The overall plan for the two and a half weeks we had to spend in Japan was to spend the first couple of days in Tokyo before moving to a more expensive hotel within walking distance of the Tokyo Gameshow for that weekend. Once the gameshow was over we were going to head down to Osaka for a few days, which is closer to a lot of assorted touristy stuff and also home turf for everyone with us who'd spent time living in Japan. From there, we were headed even further south to spend a few days at an Onsen resort in Beppu, before heading back up to Osaka and finally Tokyo again before leaving. Accompanying me on this epic trip was quite a considerable group consisting of my housemates pinneagig (aka Sho, Tifa) and jaseroque (aka Rhyme, Aeris), as well as k_chan009 (aka Neku, Zack), alyssea (aka Shiki, Cloud), velithya (aka Beat, Sol), _melelel ("She who was placed on this earth to grouch and wear cool shoes") and her sister who has no LJ name I am aware of, but who will call 'Violet' and note that she arrived in Japan suffering from a mild cold (more on this later). Special credit goes to k_chan009 who was one of our Japanese speakers and who made nearly all the phone calls to hotels and basically organised most of the trip for the rest of us. <3 velithya was leaving us after the first week to spend the rest of her holiday time in the States, which was also part of the reason we wanted to cram as much as possible in while she was there.

Not all went to plan or even nearly to plan; there were some epic dramas, not least of all including various important costume parts being left on planes or not packed at all and having to be sent over in a great rush and at an expense no-one really wants to think about. Over the course of the two weeks, everyone except _melelel (too cool to be sick), velithya (got out early) and pinneagig (I do not even know how she pulled this one off) fell victim to what quickly became known as the Violet Plague. Out of everyone else I personally got about the least case of it (about 24 hours of feeling genuinely ill, followed by a lot of coughing and sneezy until we went home) and am willing to count myself lucky for it. But the upside is that while things could have gone a lot smoother, I don't think anything went wrong in any of the truly unfixable ways that that would have meant missing out on things we'd been particularly looking forward to. And all the stress aside, I for one had a fantastic time.

Anyway: Tokyo, the first major stop. The flight over was the midnight horror variety and the train trip from the airport in Narita to the relatively cheap hotel where we were spending the next couple of days was not short either, so it was well into the evening before anyone was up to doing anything much. We didn't have a lot of time there before we had to move on to the next hotel, but we got to have a good run around Akihabara (suburb known for electronic goods and also pretty awesome for anime shopping) and Shinjuku (known for clothes/fashion, I think? If not, that's most of what we bought there). Naturally, one of the main stops in Akihabara was their Animate, which is a massive all-purpose anime goods store that parted us with plenty of our money, but one of the other big highlights was the capsule toy stores like the Yellow Submarine chain. For those not familiar, a lot of Japanese toys come in a kind of lucky dip set in boxes or capsules and you never know which you're going to get until you buy one and open it, which is not always much fun when there are only one or two figures in the set you really want and the rest seem to have been included to frustrate people. Capsule toy stores get you around the problem by buying up whole sets of the figures, removing the boxes and putting the toys on individual display for you to choose between. You never know quite what you're going to find in those places - they won't always have the complete sets available, some will have sets of toys that came out years ago, and popular toys can be quite expensive. But while every Animate stocks pretty much exactly the same merchandise, poking through half a dozen different capsule toy stores can be half the fun of finding toys there.

And then there was Shinjuku, which started a theme that would continue to Osaka and beyond, and result in that unknown number of buckles lurking in my suitcase (or now in my wardrobe). This is one of those bits where I need to step back for a minute and explain that although all my time cosplaying and roller-skating means I have a whole wardrobe full of weird costumes and sparkly leotards, my day to day street wear defaults to the t-shirt and jeans variety. I've got plenty of friends - including some in our travelling party - who are awfully snazzy dressers in the day to day sense as well as big fans of Goth-Loli and related styles, but it's never been a style that's appealed to me personally so much that I'd shell out money for it. So understand where I'm coming from when I say that the kinds of clothes you can find even in non-specialty stores in Japan are truly fantastic. Leave me in this country long enough and even I might wind up developing a clothing problem.

And I have to say, looking at the kind of stuff some people wear just on the street around this country really puts the ridiculously complicated clothes and huge hair you see in Japanese video games into perspective. The character designers probably *have* to go overboard with frills and trills and zips and buckles when they're putting together a wardrobe for a game character or they'll be left in what amounts to slightly unusual street wear.

This is all taking the long way to getting to the point that although I didn't buy a lot of clothing in Japan, I appear to have come home with a bad addiction to a particular clothing brand. (The name - as we discovered later - is 'Qutie Frash' which is presumably a bad spelling of 'Cutie Flash' which is rather laughable when you note that the primary colour of nearly all their clothes is black, the brightest secondary colour is probably a bit of gold or silver trim, and if the style classifies as goth-loli at all it must be seriously heavy on the goth side. But like so much in Japan it's probably best just not to question these things.)

The fault goes to a certain multi-story clothing store that we will call 'OiOi' (locals apparently call it 'maru' as in circle, but I can assure you that 'OIOI' is exactly what was written on the side of the building) in Shinjuku, specialising in assorted goth-loli/alternative fashion. pinneagig and I made it through the first two floors without seeing anything we wanted to look at twice - then we got to the third one and, oh hey, some of this stuff over in this corner is actually starting to look seriously cool, which lead to me eyeing off this seriously awesome looking blue and black coat in the kind of way you do when you don't seriously imagine you're actually going to buy anything but might just try a few things on just to see, and hey, since jaseroque was already trying on this gorgeous pseudo-Japanese style dress we'd all been admiring, it wasn't like I was going to be holding anyone up...

The trouble with having no serious intentions to buy something is that it works a lot better when you didn't bring along a large group of excitable friends who can be counted on to cheer loudly and encourage you to do the opposite. The rest of the evening involved a lot of cries of things like 'look what you made me do!' which the guilty parties would only happily agree with. (But seriously, it is very hard to regret, this is one truly gorgeous coat. And I will find excuses to wear it if it kills me.)

I also bought an undershirt to go with it, and a Chinese-style shirt by the same brand later in the trip. Also velithya bought the same coat in red, pinneagig bought one of their tops and jaseroque did buy that dress, so it's by no means just me who's picked up this bug. Must remember to forward the website address on to k_chan009 too...

And that, three thousand words later, covers... the first three days of the trip. o_O Oookay, time to hit post and make some mental promises to be a bit less wordy about the rest of it.

Comments

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

*grin* Japan: a country without need for the word 'meterosexual'.

I always get that with Japan too - usually holidays wear me out, but both times I've been there I've left the country wanting to turn around and go straight back.