November 11, 2002 - 7:11 PM
Wes Ehrlichman

I decided to add another small section to the site, chronicling my extreme spending while in Japan. It's sort of out of hand, and because of the trips I've taken I haven't saved much, but hey some people come to Japan to learn Japanese and expand their horizons, I come to Japan to shop! Normally this will just be single items of interest that people in America might not know about, but since I went to Nagoya last week I have several cool items to show everyone.

In fact, this far-too-long entry is all about my trip to Nagoya to visit Christina. The trip overall was great, I saw a lot of cool stuff, and as you can see from the list above, bought a lot of cool stuff. To be honest though, my first impressions of Nagoya were not very favorable. It's a city (and a big one at that), but it's not a hugely famous city like Tokyo or Kyoto so I don't think as much of it was destroyed during the war to the point that it had to be rebuilt. It just initially felt really old and really big. It's like everything was built in the time period just after stuff old in a cool way, and just before stuff is new in a cool way. I've heard Osaka's the same way. I really wasn't there to see the city though, I was there to see the people, and that was definitely the highlight.

The first day we headed into the high-class commerce area of Nagoya. The first stop? Pokemon Center Nagoya baby! This is a big store that sells nothing but Pokemon merchandise. It just opened up a few weeks ago and the line to get in was around a half an hour long! We hopped into line and shortly after we were standing in the store. Here's some pictures:

The store had everything Pokemon you could think of. There were small plastic toys, small stuffed animals, big stuffed animals, tons of candy, mugs, cookie tins, buttons, pins, videos, comics, games, and three types of Game Boy Advances with pokemon on them that are only available at pokemon stores. They were just starting to get in Christmas Pokemon stuff, like these Pikachu Snowmen dolls.

We stayed in there until Christina started going insane from the sheer amount of little kids running around. It was pretty amazing. I can't imagine how big that store's going to be in a few weeks when the new Pokemon game comes out here. The line will probably go all the way back to the Starbucks around the corner!

I came up with an idea that they should sell custom Game Boy Advances where you pay $20 above the regular price of a gameboy and you choose your color of system from 6 or so, then choose a pokemon, and you wait 10 minutes or so while they go into the back and slap a custom faceplate on it with the outline of your chosen pokemon. They'd just have to keep around 30 or so faceplates for each of the 250 pokemon (soon to be 350). Since there's only around 4 Pokemon stores in the world it would really give people a reason to make their way to one. They would make a killing online too! It's a good way to make $20 on a 3 cent piece of plastic. If you're reading this Nintendo and you choose to do my idea I won't sue you as long as you give me a free red magikarp GBA!

That night we went to the Hard Rock Cafe to eat. I liked it much better than I thought I would. It wasn't necessarily awesome food, and it was about twice as much money as any Japanese restaurant I've been to, but it was worth it just to have the feeling of America. We had Fajitas and Potato Skins without bacon.

About half the people in there were white. You would think that all of the patrons would try to speak to each other since it's a place where English is actually the dominant language in Japan, but that wasn't the case. The theory is that after a certain amount of time in Japan foreigners adopt "the gaijin snub" where they won't initiate conversation with people that they can actually talk to for some reason. Along the same lines I kept trying to talk to the waiters (who were Japanese) in Japanese and they kept trying to talk to me in English. It was pretty funny. Finally on the way out when we went to the gift shop the lady finally spoke in nothing but Japanese. It felt really good for some reason.

That night we went to go see The Ring, which recently came out in America. It's a remake of a Japanese movie, and since we're in Japan we had to see it! It was a pretty good horror movie. It creeped me out, and it really creeped Christina out. She wouldn't let me talk about it at all on the way home, and I kept wanting to bring it up and talk about it. It was good at what it tried to do, meaning that it made me scared, but I wanted more closure to the story for some reason. Oh well. I think I'm becoming overly critical of everything.

The next day, after a late start filled with plenty of the Gamecube game Animal Crossing, we went to Osu, the trendy area of Nagoya. At least, that's how I see Osu. They have a series of at least 100 really cool stores with a covered walkway between them. There were at least 10 really cool toy stores, several with nothing but stuff you normally get from putting coins in machines along the street. There were also a few underground CD stores (that were literally underground, in the basements of other stores), and lots of cool clothes shops. One of which had a western theme, which I thought was pretty funny for Japan.

(here's Christina in front of one of the toy stores with a huge Voltron)

At the end of the long string of shops was the religion section of Osu. There was a big Buddhist Temple, a nearby Shinto Shrine, and a Christian Church. The Buddhist Temple was huge and really pretty. When you go inside there is a huge rope hanging down that reaches up to a big bell at the top. People throw japanese dimes into the pit in the middle and then ring the bell. I'm not too up on Buddhism, but it's probably for good luck or something.

Inside of the temple we saw some woman shaking the crap out of a small black doll. I showed Christina and we stared at her for a few seconds trying to figure out what she was doing.

"Oh my god! We need to quit staring," Christina whispered. We left the temple and I asked her why she freaked out. She's studied Japanese religion more than I have and she told me that it was a lost child ritual. Then she told me something that I've learned before, but I had forgotten. Apparently abortion is the most used form of birth control in Japan and the monks tried to push shaking a doll at the Buddhist temple as a way to deal with the guilt associated with it. Sounds pretty nuts to me. You would think the government would do something like promoting condoms or something before it would come down to the Buddhist temples, but they haven't done that at all.

They are really strange about sex in Japan. There are porn shops all over, I pass two Adult Video vending machines on the twenty minute road between Miyanojo and Kedouin, and the porn magazines are in prominent places in most convenience stores and bookstores. It's not uncommon to see naked people on TV either, yet I haven't seen anything pushing safe sex at all, and I haven't seen condoms in any store yet. At any rate, this lady shaking the black Buddah doll freaked me out.

The following is a pictoral list of all of the places to pray (or shake your Black Buddah) in Osu.

Buddhist Temple	Shinto Shrine
Christian Church	Uncle Meat

The Uncle Meat one is a joke if you hadn't guessed, it was across from the huge Buddhist Temple.

After shopping in Osu all day we came home and ate dinner with Christina's homestay family. They went on a day's vacation shorty after I arrived, so this was the first time I really got to meet them. There are five people in Christina's homestay family, the Maedas.

• Yasuo, the father
• Akiko (mama), the mother
• Yuki-chan, the 7 year old daughter
• Ma-chan, the 5 year old son
  
• Mayu-chan, the baby
  

They are so cute! It makes me jealous of Christina that she gets to stay in such a cool homestay. I guess homestay families can go both ways as far as how much freedom you're given, but Christina got very lucky, and they understand that she's an adult and isn't going to get into trouble if she stays out late. They speak actual real Japanese to us too, especially the kids. That's the best part about it. It seems like it would be so much easier to learn Japanese when you've got someone that speaks at a low level all the time. Not to mention that they're so cute! We all played games together in Christina's room and even though we didn't talk too much I think they liked me. Christina says they're still asking about me!

The next morning the kids got ready for some festival called the Shichi-go-san, or 7-5-3 festival. They put on their expensive Japanese-style clothing and got blessed or something. Christina and I overslept and we got out there just as they finished getting prepared and were taking the pre-departure pictures. That's why we look like such slobs in the picture. Oh well. The kids look cute.

After they left we headed back to the high-class commerce district with no real destination. We walked around for a while trying to decide what to do when I finally picked up that there was music playing in the background. I was really liking what I heard so I asked Christina if it was live. She said that live bands sometimes play in the nearby park. We followed our ears toward the music and indeed there was an amazing band playing! They sounded so good for a Japanese band that it was unreal. You probably won't understand the reference, but it was like a mixture between the more rocking Elliot songs and Sunny Day Real Estate. At least that was what my ears told me at the time. None of the Japanese people seemed to be into it at all. They were just sitting around the park talking. It felt like the concert was just for me and Christina. We watched from the side and eventually moved up front. The vocals were great and as you can see from the pictures below the band really got into it.

In front of where they were playing was an advertizement for a 4-song CD that they put out. The band sounded so good that I had to buy the CD regardless of cost. When they finished playing me and Christina clapped really loud and walked around to where they were selling the CD. I paid the guy 1100 yen (about $10 for 4 songs) and told him something in Japanese to the effect of, "You're pretty good at playing your instruments," I think. Oh well, I think he may have gotten the picture. This would be a great story of how I discovered Japan's best unknown band, but when we got home and popped in the CD it was the worst thing either of us had ever heard. It's like a whole different band. I don't know if the members are different or if production can really affect a band's sound that much, but the CD is absolute garbage.

The next band that played sucked so we walked around the city a little bit more. We were going to get some print club's made (the little sticker pictures), but the place was completely packed!

I've never seen anything like it. There's around 5 print club machines in every arcade and department store in Japan, but this special print club store was packed to the brim with Japanese girls. Many of which were wearing outfits like anime girls. In bigger cities people actually do get dressed up like cartoon characters and walk around like that. This is another part of Japan that I'll never understand. I've tried to put my finger on it, but I'm afraid it will just never make sense.

Christina wanted to show me some shoes she wants, so we went into a shoe store. Japanese people have access to the sweetest shoes in the world. I'm very picky when it comes to shoes. Whenever it's time for me to get some new shoes in America I have to go into three different stores before I can even find a shoe that I would consider wearing. Eventually I just wear down and buy whatever is the most wearable pear that the store I'm in happens to have. In Japan though it's the exact opposite. I would have trouble finding a shoe I wouldn't wear! Even the ones that are on display in the front of the store are cool looking.

This is the Converse section at a Nagoya shoe store. It's not even all of the Converse shoes that they've got in stock. There's still another small section on the wall to the left where the overflow sits. The downside is that these shoes are about three times as much money as they would be in America. If they had this many styles in America though I'd be willing to pay a bit more for some cons. It's hard enough to find shoes that I like.

The next day we went to a really nice place to eat with an open buffet and some really good potato salad. Here's a note for anyone making potato salad. If you're making potato salad take a slice of apple and cut it into really, really thin slices and throw it in. It really upped the flavor in this place's.

We thought we barely made it to the airport on time, but my plane was actually leaving about a half an hour after my travel agency had told me so I sat in the airport and talked to Christina for a little bit. It's hard to be away from each other, but it's really nice just to know that someone I love is in the same country. I don't know.

Read Christina's take on the weekend by clicking here.

Alright, I'll end this entry the same way I end all my classes. "Thank you very much. See you next time. Bye bye!"