Ippoippo

Ouch. That’s a nasty looking typhoon. Went through pretty much the same area where we used to live too.

Yuko’s cousin is coming out to the UK, though it turned out he wasn’t that affected. His flight was ‘only’ delayed by 90 minutes. Will find out later today if it was a bumpy take off.

Talking of Japan… this has to be one of the most stupid ‘Commentary’ articles I’ve read at Japan Today.

And finally… well, there is going to be a big media scrum now.
I must admit, when the whole affair started, I had a ‘bad feeling’ about the parents. However, it was just a bad feeling, and I would be daft to say they were innocent or guilty. Even now, we’d be stupid to jump to conclusions.
Now, if you live in the UK, you would have certainly been exposed to the media frenzy around this case, especially the printed media like the The Daily Express and The Daily Mail.
Those papers have been rather supportive to the McCanns. In fact too supportive. They ignored the obvious questions about why they left their children alone while they went out to party in the evening. These papers instead decided to be typically xenophobic/Little England and bitch off about the inept foreign police.

So, with this announcement, how long before they change their tune and quietly forget their previous stance on the subject. Going by previous evidence… not long.

At last, something decent on TV.
Heroes has finally arrived onto Digital Terrestrial TV in the UK (after some showings on Satellite and Cable) over at BBC2.

First two episodes were last night. It’s quite amusing because there is a Japanese character, with some bits being in Tokyo (well, maybe not all bits… there were some rather onset shots of what was meant to be a Tokyo back-alley).
So, I’m having fun trying to understand a lot of it… not doing to bad at times. Of course, the character Hiro can speak some English too (the actual actor is very good at English… ).

Yuko enjoyed the show in general, as well as the Japanese segments. She was quite quick to point out that Hiro’s work friend though didn’t seem very Japanese, as his accent was wrong, and he looked Korean. Turns out she was right… that chap is a South Korean.
Doesn’t bother me too much, as I can’t pick up his fake Japanese accent… though now it’s be pointed out, I can see he isn’t Japanese.

Anyway, we’re both looking forward to the next episodes.

YATTA!!!

Japan News

Good old Aso. Never fails to amuse me.

In other Japan related stuff, I read quite an interesting story. As you may have read elsewhere, it has been decided that Pluto is not a planet anymore, but a dwarf-planet. What’s this got to do with Japan. Well, I hadn’t thought about this until reading the story, but ‘dwarf-planet’ needs to be translated into Japanese. Turns out it’s not such a simple task.

Finally, in Japan new, seems someone has been caught out about their true age. I suppose it really does show the pressure that Japanese girls who are trying to break into showbiz (whether that be modelling, singing etc) are under. Mind you, we do get it in the West as well, but this seems more extreme. I can ‘understand’ a women lying about being 29 when she’s 32, if she was just trying to get into showbiz. That’s the kind of thing that would happen here. But saying your 19, when you are ONLY 22!!!

Non-Japan

From the BBC.

Eyeing the fish on offer in Brixton Fish Market suspiciously, Dennis McCann, 52, said: “It all looks a bit to foreign to me.

“I like fish and chips and I like a good cod or plaice. I just can’t imagine having pomfret and chips.”

That’s so typically little-islander British. I despair sometimes.

Welcome back to Wales….
We’ve arrived, and I’ve managed to get hold of an internet connection for now… in the office

Just to keep my link back to Japan though, found some new blogs which I’ll be reading.
First up, we have JapanNewbie, which has some pretty interesting Japanese language tuition on Kansai-ben (the Kansai dialect of Japanese from the area around Osaka and Kyoto). There was a story of particular interest, titled “Skinny Girls”. When you come to Japan, you always notice (compared to the UK in my case), how most people are slim and in good shape (some you notice more than others, ahemm …. [ouch!!! virtual slap from Yuko there] ). There are of course a few chubbier people, and the school kids seem to have a higher proportion of chubby people (though, not usually obese). During my time here, it feels like already that the kids have been getting chubbier too. Too many damn McDonalds.
So, that story on skinny girls was quite a shock to me. Japan has a huge percentage of underweight girls compared to it’s GDP…. as the graph shows. That’s just crazy!

The other new site I’ve found is Gaijin on the Run. There was quite an interesting post on the actual count of kanji characters in Japanese, around about 50,000. Yet… to read a newspaper, to be considered literate, you only need to be able to read 2000 characters, 4%! Yep, it’s a strange concept indeed being considered literate when you can only read 4%. Anyway, the full post on that is here.

Anyway, we are now moved into the house we’ve got for about 6 months, before we sort out more long-term housing. We are living right on the northern edge of Cardiff, and we can see the country side about 10-15 minutes walk away…. our place is in the middle of a very green (well, green and brown given it’s winter) housing area. Yuko told her folks that we are living in the country. To her, these suburbs are very countryside-ish to her. She’s happy though… Sainsbury is only 10 minutes walk away!
Just got things to sort out now, switching electricity supplier, sorting out new mobile phone number etc etc. Joy!