I think this is why we moved to Japan

Thriller, thriller night

Tsutaya is a giant DVD, CD and manga rental chain that's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with branches all over Japan. You can hire nearly any DVD for a week for a measly 100 yen (not new releases though). Heaps of the Japanese movies don’t have English subtitles (the Miyazaki anime films do though – I loved Porco Rosso), but they do have a big selection of Western movies, so it’s been a pretty useful resource over the long, cold winter months.

Walking around the aisles at Tsutaya looking for something to watch is a maddening experience, for two reasons. Firstly, of course, all the movie titles are in Japanese, so for example, instead of looking for Lord of the Rings, you're looking for ロードオブザリング (roudo obu za ringu). This makes browsing very difficult, as it’s often quicker to just pull boxes off the shelf and look at the covers than it is to decipher the translations. Sometimes titles are translated phonetically (like Lord of the Rings above), but sometimes they’re completely butchered into baffling Japanese phrases. For example, Sense and Sensibility translates to On One Fine Day, the Bond film You Only Live Twice is given a kinda totally different meaning with the title 007 Dies Twice, and Army of Darkness is known as Captain Supermarket (!). Apparently Mr Deeds Goes to Town is known here as Opera Hat, but it was translated so long ago (1937) that now no one knows why!

Secondly, Tsutaya has the absolute worst in-store music I’ve ever, ever heard anywhere ever. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is literally on something like a one minute loop, blaring the trumpet hook at you again and again as you try to decipher the spines of ザネバーエンディングストリー (The Neverending Story) or ココシャネル (Coco Chanel). It’s part of a current (long-running, trust me) promotion, and it’s horrible, especially when you get in one of those video shop “can’t choose” stupors.

But there are many entertaining aspects to this place as well. Chief among them for me is browsing the selection of crappy C- and D-grade knock-offs of blockbuster movies that seem to have been churned out solely to hoodwink the foreign DVD-renting public. I took some photos the other day to illustrate.


This here is Tomb Soldier, starring not Angelina Jolie, but perhaps Angelina Jolie’s body double from the Tomb Raider movies.


Next we have Jack Hunter 1 and 2 (above), and the remarkably similarly-themed Treasure Hunter series. The blatant crystal skull on the cover of Treasure Hunter is a nice touch.



Batman, the Dark Knight himself, apparently has a few contenders for the title of Gotham City’s most brooding, dressed-in-black vigilante in the Darkness Knight and the Black Knight.

Optimus Prime’s brother just doesn’t have the star power of his more famous sibling, but that didn’t stop him winning the lead role in Transbattle. Good for him.


After the release of Hulk and The Incredible Hulk, some genius saw a clear gap in the market for Incredible.

At least The Bible Code isn’t based on a ham-fisted, poorly-researched, hackjob detective novel, and doesn’t star Tom Hanks.


I love this one: The Day Another Tomorrow. The dream sequel we all wanted but thought we would never get? You'll notice this one is from the director of Centre of the Earth -- that's not the same movie as Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

I think the flavour of the month in Japan is disaster movies, as there are heaps of these generic 2011/Cloverfield clones crowding the shelves. I don’t know what the deal with the snake and the submarine is though (the movie is called Snake Dive – sounds exciting).

And of course, at the top of this post you saw Shark in Venice, a movie about a shark. In Venice. This is not a direct rip-off of anything as far as I know, and actually looks pretty awesome. It’s a really big shark! In Venice!

I regret to inform you that we have not watched any of these gems yet, but maybe I should do a review sometime...

Tokyo ni ikimashita!

Last month we went to Tokyo again, but we never blogged about it because we've been having internet problems and our connection's slowed down to a horrible impossible speed (oh no! my cola!). But Tokyo was really very fun, so let's just forgive and forget our tardiness and jump right on in there.

We left Sendai on Waitangi Day up to our shins in snow and travelled happily on the shinkansen through a Siberian countryside. This is Gareth in the local park on the way to the subway station.

On this trip we decided to shy away from the backpackers and capsule hotel experience and stay in the luxury of a business hotel's double room -- no bigger than a bathroom, but none-the-less our own room. We were even treated to complimentary hand towels and dried beans.

The hotel was in Asakusa-bashi, close to the very old district of Asakusa, famous for its architecture, temples and local craftwork. Unfortunately, in the area directly surrounding our lodgings we found nothing but cheap souvenir shops and about two million bead shops. It did have one super redeeming feature though: a sumo stadium. And to our utter delight there was a tournament happening on the Sunday. Considering there are only six major tournaments a year throughout Japan we certainly felt our luck.


We really enjoyed the sumo! There was lots and lots of ceremony involved: the wrestlers would enter the ring, throw salt around, slap themselves on the thighs, stomp their feet, throw around more salt, allllllmost look like they were about to start, throw more salt, crouch and then finally wrestle. It was pretty fun seeing them go for it -- lots of grabbing and pushing and flipping each other, and some very close matches with big comebacks and exciting finishes.

At half time there was an amusing bit where three or so scrawny gaijin kids at a time would try to push the wrestlers out of the ring. It was funny; they didn't move an inch.


This is apparently the sumo mascot (the bird, not the old man).

Outside the stadium, Gareth delighted in giving a big sumo wrestler a big purple nurple.

The night before we had been to see a band called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, a kind of 80s indie throwback band who were pretty fun, if perhaps not extraordinary. We discovered they were playing on the day and kind of decided to go on a whim, since we get so few international bands playing in Sendai. Here's a blurry picture (the lead singer never took his zipped-up leather jacket off the whole time, even though it was super hot inside. He was very dedicated to "the look").

Afterwards we treated ourselves to the drunken salaryman's dinner of choice: ramen.

And finally (skipping back to Sunday, after the sumo), there was the reason for our trip in the first place: miss Joanna Newsom, touring her then-soon-to-be-released (now released) album Have One On Me. She was so beautiful, like a little horse nuzzling her harp, and her fingers were like spiders spinning webs. Her drummer was amazing too.


She played for around an hour and a half, and she was just devine. The venue was not so good -- it seemed overbooked it was so crowded, and we could hear trains going past overhead sometimes -- but it didn't dampen our enjoyment one bit.

Here is one of Joanna Newsom's new songs for you to sample:

Joanna Newsom - Easy

Have One On Me is a beautiful album, and it is three discs long! Bliss!

Twelve tip-top tunes from 2009

Yeah, it's a little late, but I figure everyone gets burnt out on year-end lists at the actual end of the year. So here's one given a little breathing room, twelve songs that I enjoyed immensely during 2009 and would like you to enjoy too. Click on the links to download.

12. Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Beware Your Only Friend
The opening track to Will Oldham's 428th studio album starts like this: "I want to be your only friend." Then a chorus of backing vocalists chime in with, "Is that scary?" Hilarious.

11. Lawrence Arabia - Apple Pie Bed
Hearing this song played live at Camp A Low Hum 2008 was a blessing and a curse. It's a great song, of course, but the damn catchiness of the chorus created an itch that wasn't scratched properly until the album came out about a year later. I was pretty itchy by that point, so man it was good hear those apple pie harmonies again at will.

10. Yo La Tengo - Periodically Double Or Triple
Yo La Tengo paint a picture of the world's most neurotic guy while sounding like the groovy house band of an amazing warehouse-style club in the sixties. It's all so effortless. How do they do it?

9. Dinosaur jr - Over It
When Dinosaur jr's original line-up got back together in 2005 nobody expected them to instantly pick up where they left off and start producing entire albums worth of totally awesome, totally rocking stuff as good as or better than anything they'd done before. The Dinosaur formula is all there, and it's great: wildly crunchy guitar, tight-as-anything rhythm section, J Mascis' slacker yowl, and a blazing guitar solo tossed off like J plays five of them each day before breakfast.

8. Girls - Lust For Life
This was a staple of 2009 best-ofs everywhere, and deservedly so. It's just an amazing feel-good jam, all hand claps, la la la backing vocals, sloppy guitar jangle and lyrics yearning for all the best summers of your life all at once.

7. Raekwon feat. Inspectah Deck, GZA, Ghostface Killah & Method Man - House Of Flying Daggers
Kung Fu voiceovers: check.
Extremely sparse, repetitive hook: check.
Multiple references to firearms and drugs: check.
Five MCs absolutely killing it on the mic: check.
Must be another Wu-Tang classic then.

6. Bill Callahan - Eid Ma Clack Shaw
Bill Callahan sings of dreaming the perfect song, waking up and writing it down in a daze, and then in the morning trying to decipher his scrawls. Then he sings what he wrote; a verse of utter nonsense, but delivered with a dry conviction that suggests that all the answers might actually be hidden in there somewhere.

5. Woods - The Dark
Woods put out a pretty good album called Songs of Shame last year, but this song was released as a single only, and I actually like it better than any song on the album (although a couple come close). This is just a really nifty pop song, with that odd Neil Young-on-helium voice and some really nice, clean guitar lines, and then it's over in two minutes, leaving you wanting more.

4. Sunset Rubdown - Idiot Heart
Twitchy twin guitars build up slowly, teasingly, to a full-speed-ahead chorus that's so awesome they don't even bother to do it again. Then there are Television-like dual guitar riffs and the bits about letting "the Icarus in your blood drown". And man, I just love some well placed backing vocals. Plus the album that this song comes from is called Dragonslayer, which is rad.

3. Haunted House - Seirra Trail
The fantastic writers at Said The Gramophone described this song as being sung by "some kind of crayfish, wild-eyed and furious, raging at us through a seaweedy warble, speaking English backwards in a way that trawled our hearts". Now I can't listen to it without picturing the lobster equivalent of Mark E. Smith ranting over those big, glorious power chords, repeated into infinity.

2. St Vincent - The Strangers
At the beginning of the year, for about four months, every single sentence I spoke was punctuated by Annie Clark singing "paint the black hole blacker, paint the black hole blacker".

1. Dirty Projectors and David Byrne - Knotty Pine
The Dirty Projectors' album, Bitte Orca, was really great, but in a completely different way to this song. The album is a warped, intellectual take on modern RnB, while Knotty Pine is simply the world's greatest, catchiest two-minute pop song. I like the former, but this concise slice of pop perfection just floors me. The interlocking voices, the twangy guitar, the playing-skeleton-bones-like-a-xylophone piano. Dear David Byrne, please recruit the Dirty Projectors as your new backing band and record an album. Your fan, Gareth.

spring is squeaking stirring sounds

Even though outside looks like this...

...inside we have lovely things growing.

These are two little plants growing in plaster eggshells I bought Gareth for his birthday. One is a miniature strawberry plant and the other is basil. Unfortunately I forgot to label the eggs so I'm not sure which is which - we will find out soon enough though!

And these are some cherry blossom branches I bought at the shops the other day. They're bloomin loverly.

gelid desu

crafternoon in Izumi

Among the Sendai ALTs there are several fellow crafters and on almost every Saturday since November-ish Gareth and I have hosted crafternoons: afternoon knitting, crocheting, felting, sewing, cross-stitch and treats! (It also forces us to clean the house regularly, which is very good for us).

We have three scarves being knitted at the moment, toys being made from felt, one blanket being crocheted, and all the countries flags in the football world cup being knitted - it's very exciting business.

Gareth has yet to pick up a crochet hook or knitting needle, so he spends his time playing on the computer and making cups of tea.

I have just finished a little stag toy for a friend in New Zealand, and remember that blanket I started so long ago...

Just big enough for me and some picnic food. I will continue to work on it for a while and hopefully Gareth will be able to fit on there one day.

a glaciating festival

It's cold in Sendai at the moment. Our pipes have frozen, the river near our house has frozen and we both have chilblains. But we are plucky kids and the biting night air could not deter us from going into town to experience the annual Dontosai Festival.

The festival is a traditional event in which people throw their paper and pine New Year decorations into a big bonfire at a shrine and pray for perfect health and good business.

It also involves poor boys and girls running up and down the street wearing as little as possible, ringing bells and carrying lanterns. And I can't express enough how cold it was that night! Even all bundled up Gareth declared he had never felt that kind of cold before, and I turned into the foulest little grump! but with gritty determination we persevered.

We followed the crowd past numerous festival meat-on-a-stick stalls, and arrived at the shrine. We threw in our five yen pieces, rang a giant bell and clapped our hands (to scare away bad spirits) wishing for good health and prosperous business.

Then we went home as fast as our cold, sore, fed-up little feet could take us.

All in all we are glad we went and experienced a traditional Dontosai. And now I never have to go again!

Accidental zen

Spotted on the walls of a karaoke place in town.

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.

Real Final Fantasy elixir! Which you can drink! I bought some!


Appearance: nice, shiny can, kind of a pearly colour, with your typical Final Fantasy heroine gazing wistfully into the distance. The elixir itself is just clear and bubbly though. I was anticipating something green or purple; a little more magical, maybe with sparks flying off it or mystical smoke overflowing from the glass. No such luck though: elixir looks pretty boring!


And it tastes like... lemonade. Sprite or its equivalent. A little disappointing, although not as disappointing as it may sound, as Japan, strangely, doesn't usually have plain lemonade. They have this "cider" stuff, which contains absolutely no apples and kind of tastes like a bubblegum-lemonade mix stuff.

On the plus side, my HP and MP were fully restored, meaning I was able to go out and fight enough random encounters to go up two levels. My strength, magic and evasion attributes went up by several points, and one enemy dropped some mythril gloves. Great! Da da da daaah daah daah da da daaaah!