chidade.net

For some reason, the Japanese have a thing about poo. Called unchi, you’ll find the Mr-Whippy-Icecream shape on all sorts of things, in an attractive brown and occassionally with little wafty lines drawn above it.

My onee-chan will alway giggle girlishly when she sees some whipped cream or something shaped like unchi. The connotations with poop just aren’t as prevalent here so there’s been at least three occassions in the last two months where she started laughing hard and took photos to put on her mixi to show her friends back home the unchi us strange Australians eat.

But then, today on Lisa Katayama’s blog, I saw a photo which took me back to my eikaiwa teaching days in Yokohama. A student had been living in Osaka for a while and came home to visit, bearing gifts. For us teachers, he presented a box full of Unchi-kun Gumi, which probably translates best into “Mr. Gummy Poop” - a gummy cola-flavoured lolly.

Aha! Australians weren’t the weird ones eating unchi-shape things! The Japanese were the weird ones eating unchi-shaped things! Advertised unchi-shaped things!The box of candy was probably finished by the staff in less than a week. There were plenty of gags and attempts to gross out the Japanese staff with practical jokes. The lollies themselves were fairly edible. Kinda more-ish. It was a challenge to try and peel them out in one piece though. Generally you had to mangle the plastic mould with your teeth to get a mouthful. Well…half a mouthful.After the box was emptied, there was a huge amount of discarded packaging. What a waste. Reminded me of this clip from Futurama:

And on a side note: I love the Internet. Doing a search for unchi turned up this completely useless factoid: there’s a children’s book called Minna Unchi, or, Everyone Poops. Good grief. I’m not sure that I believe that the author’s name was really Taro Gomi. It’s kinda like saying his name was “John Poopies”. Only in Japan.

UPDATE: I’ve been told by my nee-san that Taro Gomi is a perfectly feasible name to have. Just a rather unfortunate one.

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Some background:

My sister is a closet emo goth with a Ragnarok Online account rather than a MySpace. Her taste in music goes along what I call the “wailing man” vein. For the last few years I’ve been subjected to the likes of Radiohead, Muse and Jeff Buckley being played through the bedroom wall, quite loudly at all hours. Sometimes, it’s the same song again and again and again.

Because of the wonders of physics, the Bedroom Wall Speaker wouldn’t actually let me enjoy the songs’ melodies, but would instead distort and muffle the music so that all I could hear was perhaps a dischord being banged out non-stop for 4 minutes, or the sound of someone moaning like a cat that hadn’t been killed when the car hit it.

In other words, I grew to hate it. My sister completely ruined any enjoyment I may have gotten out of this music. Now, Muse and Radiohead I could probably live without, but Jeff Buckley! JEFF BUCKLEY! That’s a crime against humanity. I can’t listen to any of that music now even if I had a state-of-the-art digital surround sound system to listen with!

Then, today, on Triple J, I heard a track by Mark Ronson. He covered Radiohead’s Just but did it in a funk style! Trumpets and sax where the guitars once where! It was Radiohead you could DANCE to!

I’m really liking the funk music that seems to be sneaking back into the music scene. In fact, I’m really liking just about all the music on JJJ at the moment. This Mark Ronson track has been around for about a year apparently. I’m really not up-to-date with new music, I admit. I’ve been tuning out of the emo bullshit that’s been overplayed on JJJ and tuning in to ABC News instead. But now that the ratings season is over, and the summer DJs are on, the music has magically improved. It seems that they’re more interested now in playing what they enjoy, not playing what they think would be good for them commercially.

Which means that songs over the day have included:

• Mark Ronson’s cover of Just
• Cornelius (yay! Japanese music is back on the radio!)
• Arctic Monkeys
• Jamie T
• …and what appears to be some old school Sex Pistols

Yep. Am enjoying music muchly. I’ll actually be listening in to the J’s more often, I think. Especially since Jackson Jackson have now released their first single for radio airplay. Album is due out in March. I’m hanging out for some Flicker and the Spark action, personally.

Anyway. Time for me to put some headphones on and enjoy my music without disturbing anyone else.

EDIT: I take it all back. Dools just played original Radiohead and some emo bastard band back to back. AFI, I think? Yech. I’m changing to PBS.

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wii-kend (noun)

A weekend devoted exclusively towards playing a Nintendo Wii.

Well…a weekend and a bit more.

I’ve been excited about the Nintendo Wii ever since I heard about the controller over a year ago. And even though I pledged never to call the Wii the Wii again, I’ve kinda been “Wiiiiiiiii”-ing a lot ever since last Wednesday night when the midnight launch was on.

Chadstone! Fashion Capital of Australia! And apparently, the biggest official launch site in Melbourne, which seems strange, as I would have expected a shop in the city to have big official festivities. Meanwhile in Sydney, at the same time, a single gamer waited alone in Bondi Junction, surely the New South Welsh equivalent of Chadstone, whilst the big launch party happened somewhere else in Sydney’s CBD…

Well, at least Matt managed to get first in line.

Anyway!

We arrived at 8.30pm since the doors to the shop were going to open at 9pm to hand out tickets. There was already a small crowd of people, including a family at the front of the line that came complete with camping chairs. Their young son was still in his school uniform, so the theory went that they picked him up from school and came straight over to line up. Apparently they had even ordered pizzas for delivery to their seats.

By 9pm, the queue was outside the doors and into the carpark.

By 9.20, the doors were finally opened and I managed to get number 29 in line.

My adopted onee-san came along with me, although I’m really not sure why. She’s not a gamer or a geek in any way. In fact, she freaks out at the idea of going into Akihabara, where she says “it stinks like otaku“. She also came along to the Melbourne eGames Expo a few weeks back. All this it seems, to take photos of Australian otaku and show them to her friends back home. The friends all seem to be amazed by the fact that there are Australian gamers and geeks. I think she regretted going to both eGames and the midnight launch of the Wii. She seemed really bored. But what could I do? I warned her plenty of times about how boring it would be for her.

Luckily, once I received my ticket and paid for everything, we were allowed to wander around. Outside the shop they had a few consoles set up to play on, but I figured I better get onee-san out of there for a break and we went to grab coffee and cake.

Mmmm, death by chocolate. And a much needed hit of caffeine. The cake arrived in a slightly unexpected way though. Maybe they were trying to tell me something at 11pm.

Some time-killing phone calls to Bondi Junction, where Matt and I were basically trying to out-geek each other, and I decide it’s time to head back to the action at 11.30pm.

There was quite a long line now. It seems that the first 100 people received blue tickets (which included me) and everyone after that had purple tickets. The queue was going to the doors even after I had picked up the console and went home. I wonder if they managed to serve everyone?

Music was booming and there were a few competitions going. A Wii Tennis tournament was well underway. Someone had dressed up as Princess Peach, complete with a papier mache turtle missile. There were plenty of fake moustaches around. A huge Link statue - which apparently they were going to give away to the best cosplayer, but since there was only one, they decided to give it to that first-in-line family. Someone will be rich from eBay now.

People were lining up for collection at last. We were handed party poppers, hehe. Then, the countdown! I was promptly hit in the back by an exploding popper. It fucking hurt. But no matter! Because I’m about to get my Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

All up, I ordered the console which came with Wii Sports, the Wii Play pack that has an extra controller (known as Hajimete no Wii in Japan), The Legend of Zelda: Twighlight Princess (of course! The shop had about 5 times more copies of Zelda than any other game for sale on the night) and Rayman: Raving Rabbids which I knew I would buy after seeing the comical series of teaser trailers. Here was a game that brought back memories of Sam and Max, The Neverhood and other nonsensical PC games. I had high hopes for this game.

Finally picked up my goodies and got out of there at about 1am. 29th in line and I still couldn’t get my stuff for about 40 minutes! The staff were apparently on 18 hour shifts or something ridiculous. And apparently not getting paid any more for it! Stupid industrial relations laws! *shakes fists*

Anyway.

Two things I am unhappy about with the Wii - it is region locked. Utter stupidity. The Nintendo DS was region free and sold like hotcakes. While I was in Japan, there was a point where the DS had actually sold out - I’m sure this was in part due to people importing because of the larger colour choices and games. Surely Nintendo could’ve used the same approach for the Wii? Region Free = Awesome.

Second bitch: The price of games! AUD$110 is recommended retail price! What?! Are you insane?! JBHiFi, however was selling them for AUD$79 so I managed to get a price match. Honestly though, what bastardry. $110?! Unbelievable. With the console and the games, I paid AUD$740. That put a dent in my account, but not as much as the PS3 will next year, I’m sure.

Anyway, I’ve now had about 5 days to play around with it. It also seems to have the Rovers’ stamp of approval. Especially Rayman, which was as ridiculous and humorous as was expected. In fact, I played so much that I had sore arms and shoulders for days! Note to any potential Wii owners: stretch before you play. It’s really a workout.

Haven’t really had a chance to get into Zelda yet, but I will this week.

One great thing about this console is that it’s great for parties. I’ve already taken it to two and people had heaps of fun with it. Even the non-gamers, which is exactly what Nintendo were aiming for in the design on this console.

Mission Accomplished, Miyamoto-san.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

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Today was the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, or JLPT, which is held around the world every year on the first Sunday in December. It was my first ever go at this exam, after studying Japanese in Year 6, a semester in my final year of university and after spending 10 months in Japan itself. Needless to say, I attempted the lowest level. Needless to say, I’ll fail miserably.

I didn’t study as much as I’d have liked since my adopted onee-san is currently in Australia and living with me until she gets her own digs. This means I’ve been spending a lot of time with her and travelling a bit. She’s helped me study a bit but memorising kanji is something that’d I’d have to do myself.

Ah well, I’m not too fussed. I didn’t need to pass this exam. I won’t be working in Japan anytime soon. I basically just did it for myself, because I’d like to watch, read and play Japanese media without the aid of subtitles one day. At any rate, I used today to get the jist of how the exam works so I can try for Level 3 next time.

I learnt one thing though - even if I had studied everything that I had planned to study, then I still would’ve had trouble today. It’s very fast paced - 40 questions in 25 minutes - and of course everything is written in Japanese. The main thing I’ll need to practice is reading hiragana and katakana quickly.

Anyway, now that my so-called studies of Japanese can be relaxed a bit, my next goal is finally clocking Final Fantasy VII. I can’t see the obsession with Sephiroth, personally. Vincent is clearly the better bishie. In human form, anyway.

One last thing tonight: Thoughts go out to Duane’s family. Duane was a former Rover who died tragically today. He’ll be missed in Scouting circles. Rest in peace.

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