1998.08.19 WED

... so I wound up back in Setagaya-ku and slept for a couple hours. When I woke up, we went to Shinjuku, where there was a pretty big comic exhibition. ( It wasn't just a spur-of-the-moment thing, it WAS planned from before :) ) There were works exhibited from 20 of the most famous comic artists of Japan. Among them were Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura), the artists behind Golgo 13 and Galaxy Express 999, and the 'father' of modern Japanese comics and animation, Osamu Tezuka.

All in all, it was pretty interesting - I think the best part of the exhibition was seeing the original works by the comic masters - and seeing that they made the very same mistakes that I do when I'm working on my own. Patch panels, lots of white-out... granted, the final result looks a LOT better, but at least I know now what kinds of mistakes the masters make :)

After that, we stopped in the Sega Joypolis for a while - really big game center with all sorts of cool rides and stuff like the Jurassic Park: Lost World game. Basically, it was just like the place I used to work except everything was more expensive and the place was actually designed well - but that's to be expected when a place is in the biggest city in Japan.

That night, I don't think we really did much else until dinner. In the time I was in Tokyo, though, I learned how to make sukiyaki and somen - so now I actually have four choices for dinner other than going out to buy it.

Sunday, I caught a bit of a cold so I stayed inside most of the day, as per Chieko-san's advice. That night we ate dinner at a place called Moo-Moo Paradise. (Actually, it's pronounced Moh-moh paradise, and spelled with 'ou' instead of 'oo', but since the Japanese way of pronouncing the cow's moo is 'moh' it ends up being the same no matter which way you look at it, so I just wasted a sentence.) The place was pretty cool - they serve American beef, which my hosts seemed pretty incredulous about. I later learned that American beef is actually really cheap compared to Kobe beef. Either way, it tasted REALLY good, and I LOVED the in-house music. Everything they played was a song I liked *.*

Anyways, I think that even after a week of trying to remember what happened, I still don't have a clue of what happened to Saturday, or maybe I just mixed up Saturday and Sunday. But anyways, I know that the LAST day I was in Tokyo, Monday, I went to Rainbow Bridge by myself. It ended up being really expensive, in comparison to the usual subway - 370 yen to get a train to Ariake. Apparently, Ariake is part of a peninsula which is separated from most of Tokyo, and Rainbow Bridge is the bridge that connects the tip of the peninsula back to the area around Shimbashi, which coincidentally means 'new bridge.' Okay, maybe it's not a coincidence.

In ANY case, before I went I wanted to go visit TV Tokyo - the place where Slayers gets put on the air. Um... it was just the third floor of a building, I think I missed it if it was anything more grandiose than that. The newly constructed Fuji TV building, on the other end of Rainbow Bridge, was much more spectacular. Of course, it's closed on Mondays, which is when I went, so I didn't get to go visit the spherical studio which looks REALLY cool from the outside of the building.

However, I did get to see the Statue of Liberty, which is of course the first thing one expects to see when coming to Japan.

No, really. France gave a scaled-down replica of the Statue of Liberty to Japan as a gift - from April 1998 until January 1999, it will be on display by the Rainbow Bridge. The plaque on the state read: IV JUILLET 1776 -- V JUILLET 1789 . I'm not sure if that's what the real Statue of Liberty's plaque read, but I've never been to Ellis Island.

(Oh, and by the way - remember how I made the joke about a month or so ago about people here being addicted to solitaire? I wasn't kidding. People are about to start a fight over who gets to play now, right beside me.)

Um... after that, I just started walking around the peninsula. There's another train station nearby, called futuristically enough, Tokyo Teleport Station. Right now they're in the process of building up something called Tokyo Teleport Town, and supposedly this will become the central train station. The day I went though, it was the most barren location I had ever seen in Japan - one family chasing a flock of birds, and that was all the people I saw for the next five minutes. Right now, there's nothing there, it was the weirdest thing I'd seen for the past few months...

As I walked further mainland, I ran into more people. Turns out they had another Lost World event - this one's a BIT more expensive (2000 yen) and I didn't feel like going in. I probably should have though, because I read in the paper (the day I got back, of course) that they had life-size animatronic dinosaurs which actually chased you around the lot for a while. Figures. After that, I caught the train home, didn't stop anywhere else because my feet were tired, and waited for the bus ride back to Osaka.

I remembered my suitcase this time. In fact, it was kinda hard to forget it, because I had to lug it back up the mountain to my room here in the dorm. Then I fell asleep until about 2 or so, because I had maybe two hours of sleep all night on the bus.

Not really much happened till Saturday, when I decided to go to the Hard Rock Cafe in Namba, Osaka City, with Yuki since she was the one who told me about it. Well... it was okay for about a half hour. Ended up running into a guy who just wanted to learn English - just so happens he wanted to learn it all when I was trying to eat. I don't have a problem answering questions about how I like Japan or how much Japanese I know or if I hate Japanese people or what's so hot about Osaka other than the temperature - but when I give an answer, I don't usually expect the EXACT same question to be asked three or four times. Pretty much everyone at the table with me knew this guy was a jerk - even his wife and his best friend. (I knew that he was his best friend because that was another of the things that he said three times.) The guy's wife even told him, "Oi, KANGAETE!!" (Hey, THINK!) once he started asking the more personal questions. I don't even remember how we ended up sitting with them, I think I just nodded my head and figured it was a good idea at the time.

In any case, I didn't get time to buy souvenirs there. We split the bill, and since I was paying for Yuki too, the guy told me it was 2000 yen for the both of us. After making sure that's what he meant (my meal alone was 1700 yen, not counting drinks), I decided the best course of action would be to get out of there as quick as possible. I don't think that guy got as much English as he wanted, but at least I got a full meal out of it.

Anyways, next week I'm going to Nagoya. Tomohiro Okada, who lived in Greenville with his parents for about a year or so, invited me and James to come stay with them for a week. He said something about an 'event' there on the 30th, but I'm not sure what kind - I guess I'll find out what it is when I get there. For now though, this letter's gone on long enough - later!