While in Tokyo, I enjoyed the uniquely Japanese experience of staying in a "capsule hotel," one of the most affordable ways of staying in a crowded Japanese city you can find. Instead of a normal hotel room, you sleep in a "capsule," a closet-sized bed that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie set in deep space. Inside your capsule is everything you need: a small TV, clock radio, pillow and blanket, and a plug for charging your tech stuff. Before retiring to your capsule for the night, you can get clean in the large bath and sauna, great for removing the day's sweat and stress. When it's time to sleep you crawl into your personal capsule, pull the curtain down and start snoring. It's quite fun, and allows you to stay in hip parts of Tokyo like Shibuya for $30 a night, compared with $150-250 for a normal hotel room. On the other hand, it is a tight squeeze in there, and even though I'm just 5'9" (175 cm) I sometimes have to sleep at an angle inside the capsule to create enough space. Back during my bachelor days I went on an extended Capsule Hotel Tour of Japan, riding the cheapest trains and staying in capsule hotels to save money. It was a lot of fun.
I've heard that it's impossible to live in a country unless you truly enjoy the food there, and it's certainly true in my case -- I couldn't be happy in Japan if I didn't love eating here. Although most people probably imagine that the Japanese eat, well, Japanese food all the time, in reality the diet here is quite varied. Some popular dishes aren't very Japanese at all, like the honorary national food of Japan, curry rice, a thick curry stew eaten over steamed rice that was introduced by the British around 1860. Many foods that we consider "Chinese," like chow mein or fried rice, have intertwined with Japanese dishes for so long that the two are almost impossible to separate, but some foods do maintain a separate Chinese feel to them, such as gyoza ("pot stickers"). Various forms of American food exist here, from fast food chains to "fami-res" outfits like Denny's and Coco's, and although you can't find a really outstanding example of the archetypal hot dog or hamburger, at least they have "American Dogs" (what a corndog is called). Popular foods that the Japanese each every day include sushi and sashimi (the latter is raw fish without the rice part), or rice bowl meals like beef bowl or "Parent-and-Child Bowl" (chicken and scrambled egg cooked and served over rice). Noodle-based dishes, from ramen to cold soba noodles or satisfying udon, are also quite common. One of my favorite dishes is Katsudon, a fried pork cutlet ("katsu") served over a bowl of rice ("don"). Because "katsu" also means "to win" in Japanese, it's common for parents to serve this to their kids before a big test or sporting event. Tomorrow my son is representing his school in the city marathon, and so we're off to eat Katsudon tonight, to help him "win."
This month marks a very special time for J-List: our tenth anniversary! It October of 1996 when I officially retired as an ESL teacher to start J-List, which we envisioned would be a kind of "magical toybox from Japan" that anyone could visit, thanks to the mystery of the World Wide Web. We've had an incredibly wild ride over the past ten years, and have loved nearly every minute of it. More than anything, we've been blessed with a broad base of great customers who are genuinely interested in learning more about Japan, and we're very happy to serve you. Thanks for ten great years, and please look forward to ten more!
To commemorate the past ten years and to thank everyone for their support we've got an announcement: we're permanently dropping the prices of nearly all English-translated PC dating-sim games from G-Collections and Peach Princess, bringing the price to many games down to just $29.95 for most CD-ROM versions, or $24.95 for download versions (which require Virtual Mate 2.0), or more. We think these PC dating-sim games, which blend beautiful characters and dramatic interactive stories, including some that can make you cry, are one of funnest ways you can interface with Japan interactively, and we've got big plans for these games in the future. We hope fans will take advantage of the new lower prices and show their support for PC dating-sim games from Japan!
Here's the World Famous Otaku lining up for the Gunbuster event. He woke up at 7 am, he's there fairly early, right? And look, there are only 40 or so people in front of him.
But no! There is another pocket of 500 or so otakus in another part of the building, there to cause me much trouble. Shields failing...hull breach, imminent...
We moved forward to get these little papers with numbers on them, which was the lottery.
In an hour or so, it was time to go see if we were chosen, but my number was not on the list. I felt like an anime character, checking to see if he'd passed the college entrance exam. While I edged forward, I peered out the window to see Yuko Ogura, apparently having been selected as the current "be careful of fire" girl from the post office.
ごめん、紀美子。もう、会えない！ (I'm sorry, Kimoko, I'll never see you again!) Part of my anguish is that Noriko Hidaka, the voice of Noriko, is also the voice of Minami Asakura of Touch fame, who was "moe" before they had a term for it (hell, before the word otaku had been coined, back in 1986 when Komiket only only up to 22 or so). Man, I would have loved to been in her presence even though she's a 60 year old woman who can play 15 year old girl roles. But it was not to be...
