30th November
Posted in General, Japan, Geeky stuff, Manga at 10:47 am by Visez
If you have never read a manga, maybe because you wouldn’t know where to start -from the back, I’d suggest- or because you just don’t want to pay stupidly high prices for an imported manga, you might want to try with Megatokyo.
Megatokyo is a free online dojinshi (independently produced manga) with high quality drawings, with about three new pages added every week. It’s a nice story (at least the first 500 or so pages - and there are about 800 online now-, afterwards it gets a little too slow and too much of a love-story IMO) about two american -or canadian?- geeks stuck in Tokyo in a series of adventures about all that is Japanese: idols, dating simulators, arcades, manga, giant robots and ninjas, of course. It’s a gentle introduction to manga and life in Japan.
Enjoy!
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30th November
Posted in General, Geeky stuff, Technology at 10:28 am by Visez
Sorry guys, I cannot hold back anymore… after posts about food, culture and society, I have to write something geeky. Japan is the only place in the world where geekiness is -to a certain extent- encouraged, a sanctuary for nerds, loners and misfits, a haven where even the whole of the Imperial College Computing department would be regarded as ubercool. Hyper-technological gadgets are everywhere: affordable, utterly useless and covered with alluring flashing lights. It’s like being 10 and seeing Doom for the first time all over again.
However, the average Japanese otaku (おたく) is much more than your average slashdot/videogames/star trek Western geek, and the geekiness phenomenon itself here is way more complex and fascinating than one would expect from a bunch of guys playing videogames and drooling over anime dolls. But this is not the place… the otaku phenomenon will be treated in another post, now I’ll cut the crap and get to the cool videogames 
…
Hon-Atsugi (like probably everywhere else here in Japan) is packed with arcades. Last week I decided to venture into one after a particularly satisfying bowl of crab tendon: pink neon-burning, cigarette-smoke laden and very, VERY noisy. Inside you can find all kinds of people: from the businessmen looking for one last adrenaline rush before going back to their wives, to the idle teenagers, to the addicted gamblers, to the fearsome Japanese kids able to finish any possible game with only one credit and constant source of shame and frustration for people like me…
At first glance you probably wouldn’t notice anything particularly different from the games you can find here and the ones in the Trocadero, same House of the Dead, same drums game, same racing simulators. Then you will probably notice an arcade machine with something unusual: it doesn’t seem to have any joystick/joypad/massive gun attached… instead, you play by moving RFID cards.
For the lazy ones that do not want to read the Wikipedia article, what’s a (passive) RFID card? To put it simply for the Londoners, an Oyster card. It’s a card with a chip inside, doesn’t need power (I know what you are thinking, you pedantic little freak… I’m trying to keep it simple here), and can communicate with another device at short range. No need for magnetic stripes or barcode. Just radio communication. That’s it in half a nutshell.
So think about this: a strategy game where you lay your RFID cards representing your troops on the battlefield, and each movement of a card on the board will correspond to the army moving accordingly in real time on the screen. Think Risk/Warhammer meets Minority Report’s interface. Here is a picture:
Sounds cool? It gets better. Obviously, you start the game with cards that represent crappy units, but as you win more games the machine will keep on spitting out more and more cards to assist you in the hunt for the ultra-rare ultimate troops. But wait, wait, it gets even better: apart from playing against the computer, useful for practice and army composition choice, all the arcades are networked so you can decide to play against people in the same arcade place or even against someone of ranking comparable to yours across the whole of Japan!! In fact, your progress is constantly tracked with a save card that contains your profile, and you know your national ranking at all times. So good… you can see here a video of one guy in action. Unfortunately towards the end he is about to lose so he just starts to shuffle the cards randomly. Oh, by the way, the name of the game is Sangokushi Taisen (三国志 大戦).
As you might have thought, I already bought my starter pack… I finished the tutorials and I’m ready for battle… Behold!!!:
As a side note, here in Japan there is something similar to the Oyster card, although it works just on one of the lines that go around Tokyo. Here’s a picture of the Suica card:
Cool thing is, you can also use it instead of a BIOS password in order to access your laptop… 
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28th November
Posted in General, Japan, Geeky stuff, Manga at 9:19 am by Visez
Hi!
Foreword： Chances are you found this post googling for some pictures of pretty Japanese girls in tight French maid outfits you can drool over. If this is the case, sorry mate, no pretty girls here, but I hope you’ll find the post interesting nonetheless.
Back to us… Last Sunday I went on a small trip to Tokyo, and I ended up in Harajuku. Rings a bell? It’s the part of the town where you want to be if you want to feel like the thousands of cool Tokyo teenagers that shop here: lots of small shops, less expensive than Shinjuku or Ginza, more rebel, more alternative, more hip. (Jesus, sometimes I sound like the Lonely Planet guide…) It also proudly hosts the Meiji temple (yes, the same Meiji Emperor guy of the Meiji Restoration), but more about that in another post.
The reason why you probably heard of Harajuku is because of this lovely natural blonde here:
(Or rather, her four Japanese freaky lifeless minions).
Those four girls you see are in fact Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls, so called because they represent the kind of crowd you can expect to meet here.
But in order to talk about that, I have to introduce the concept of Cos-Play (コスプレイ). Cosplay (Costume play) is the practice of dressing up either like anime/manga characters or just in a generally ridiculous (but fashionably so) way. And it doesn’t have anything to do with Halloween or Mardi gras. So if when walking down the street you happen to notice just how short Sailor Moon’s skirt is or you find yourself wondering why you remembered maids as fat and German while here they are slim, young and probably, judging from what they are wearing, very cold, it means that you are witnessing people doing cosplay. You can mostly find them in big manga stores or during conventions, and of course here in Harajuku every weekend before dusk.
So, here’s a sample of what I saw on Sunday:
Now… cosplay is mainly for girls… guys will be there pretending to be rockers and playing the guitar. However, sometimes something goes terribly wrong and they end up like this:
The guy was quite immense, and after seeing him I really didn’t need him to speak to me with a really high-pitched voice (stile cugini di campagna) that scared the crap out of me and made me want to cry for mercy… Impossible not to think of the giant in little girl’s attire from the paedophile episode of BrassEye.
But in the pitiless world of fashion, not everyone can be cool:
You might be asking yourself, why do they do it? I’m not a social anthropologist, but maybe if you too lived in one of the many faceless buildings in some unnamed Tokyo suburb going to school from Monday til Sunday in this orderly, well-mannered, overformal Japan maybe you would feel as well an urgent need to break free before going slightly mad…
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25th November
Posted in General, Geeky stuff, Manga at 8:54 pm by Visez
Maruko nella terra della patata a mandorla. What the hell does it mean?, I hear you say… Well, I’ll start with the first part of the title, Maruko.
You might know that when going to a different country some people get a different name. This happens mostly for practical reasons, for example a Chinese name that would be very hard to pronounce for us Westerners…
For me it was pretty much the same: in Japanese you will never find two consecutive consonants in a word (unless one of them is an n), so a name like Marco (my name, btw) needed some obvious restyling. Instead of choosing something completely different, I went for an adaptation of my name, that in Japanese sounds like Maruko.
Finding some decent kanjis for my name was not easy… apparently, apart from the Chinese reading (On yomi) and the Japanese reading (Kun yomi) there are special readings (nanori) used for names of people and places, and there are so many kanjis for a given sound that it took me a while to check the different combinations. Anyway, I have generally been a pain in the ass to whoever could help me with that (ごめん 健康さま ｍ（_ _）ｍ )… but after so much effort, one would expect to get a cool, awe-inspiring name that would seduce foreign princesses and scare the baddies away.
So obviously I was rather taken aback when I noticed that whenever I introduced myself to any Japanese person (including colleagues) they couldn’t help smirking, giggling or looking at me checking whether I was trying to be funny. -Sigh- I have to say, people warned me about this. Apparently there is a stupid cartoon here in Japan that is called Chibi Maruko-chan (Little Maruko)… this is not a problem, I wouldn’t mind sharing my name with the main character of some cool cartoon (Tipo Ken shiro…. figata!). Unfortunately, Chibi Maruko-chan is not quite as cool as Hokuto no Ken. Description follows (uhm uhm, and I quote) :
Chibi Maruko chan is the nick name of a sweetly obnoxious 9-year-old girl. She tricks her grandfather, ponders for hours over how to spend her allowance, and hates sitting next to ugly boys.
You think this is depressing? You haven’t even reached the best part yet!! Would you like to know WHY this little pest is called Maruko?? Maruko in Japanese can be written as 丸子 (which should be enough of an explanation for those that can read it), and for those of you that cannot read kanji, here you go:
[…] she is quite small, so people think she looks like a little ball and call her “Chibi Maruko”.
Yup, 丸 means ball and 子 means child. You can see her picture around this post. So depressing… My friends told me I should have chosen Mitsu Kunimito from Manga Mitonomikon (まんが水戸黄門) or Captain Tsubasa as a name 
… That would have been better…
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