Erin’s Challenge! I can speak Japanese

Erin's Challenge

I am months late to the game, but I found this interesting Japanese-learning website set up by the Japan Foundation called Erin’s Challenge! I can speak Japanese. It has a few dozen short skits with copyable soft-subs in Japanese, kana, romaji and English and a bunch of Flash learning apps. The corny acting is so amusing. The website also comes in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean.

The Flash video player it uses to do soft-sub and line-by-line playback makes me wonder if a similar interface might be helpful for anime/drama playback. Everything is soft-subbed these days; maybe it’s time we do something with it.

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What I think the future will be

Cymek

I was bored yesterday and wrote a little summary of my thoughts for the future. This was partially inspired by the upcoming Singapore General Election taking place tomorrow and a certain online conservation I had with someone. After I finished writing it, I realized that it bears some similarities to the Dune timeline, so perhaps I was just agreeing with Frank Herbert.

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Japan’s Southernmost Train Station

Kagoshima

So not too long ago, I was in Kagoshima, the southernmost prefecture on Japan’s four main islands. It is a rather backwater place despite the abnormally large role it played in Japan’s contemporary history, but it is very beautiful.

Kagoshima is also the location of Nishi-oyama Station, Japan Railways’ (JR) southernmost train station.

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Infinite Stratos

Infinite Stratos

Clichés make a show boring. The more clichéd a story is, the less interesting and enjoyable it becomes. But my theory is that this relationship only holds true until you hit a certain magical event horizon where the laws of the universe break apart, one gets divided by zero and clichés become art.

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Posted in Anime | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Trip Report: Nagasaki

Nagasaki

So I am finally back in Singapore. Experiencing post-trip lethargy as usual. I figure I should get started on blogging now before it becomes impossible for me to return to my usual weekly schedule and I fall into the eternal dark void of procrastination.

Nagasaki was the first city in Kyushu I really visited, not counting a short transit at Fukuoka, and it was pretty awesome.

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Gunkanjima

Gunkanjima

Gunkanjima, officially “Hashima”, is a tiny island just outside Nagasaki Bay. Consisting mostly of man-made concrete-covered landfills, the island was a coal-mining operation run by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry and once boasted the highest population density in the world. Today, the only way to land on the island is by forking out 4,300 yen for a cruise tour that departs twice everyday from Nagasaki Ferry Terminal.

I was there a few days ago and took some pictures.

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Maaya Sakamoto 2011 Live Tour (Osaka)

Maaya Sakamoto
Concert booklet and T-shirt

I expected last year to be my first and last chance to watch Maaya Sakamoto perform live, but I was wrong and my sentiments at the time were rendered somewhat hyperbolic in retrospect. In spite of the recent events in Japan, I managed to make my way to Osaka International Convention Center last night for her “You can’t catch me” live tour.

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Space Battleship Yamato (Live Action)

Space Battleship Yamato

Hollywood has its flaws. Cookie-cutter scripts and commodification of art can often ruin beautiful things. But at least Hollywood gets the cinematography right and doesn’t usually suffer from the pandemic of awkward overacting rampant in Japanese mainstream cinema. 2011’s Space Battleship Yamato live action movie is anime-comes-alive, but in a bad way that constantly reminds you how stupid the world would be if everyone behaved like manga characters.

Still, it’s not a total disaster.

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Posted in Otaku, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Tohoku Pacific Earthquake

Earthquake
Sendai, Miyagi prefecture (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

I don’t normally like to write about breaking news because generally I find that I have neither the first-hand expertise nor the retrospective hindsight to comment on most real-time events non-trivial. The story would be very different if the earthquake had happened three weeks later when I will be in Tokyo and perhaps Kamakura and/or Tochigi, but it didn’t.

That said, I feel compelled to write something about the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan after spending the past two days following the continuous Twitter updates and watching NHK and TBS news streams. So here it is.

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Catherine

Catherine

So I have been clocking a few hours into Atlus’ horror puzzler Catherine on my PS3 because Rie Tanaka was tweeting about it and I am easily influenced by Twitter. Surprisingly, it is actually not a bad game, but it takes a lot of patience to overcome the rage-inducing learning curve, and ultimately at the end of the day the puzzle stages are not what people play the game for, or maybe that is just me.

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