pdscomp's Journal: Thursday 15 January 2004 7:50 AM JST

Yesterday was a very tiring day. We were on our feet for pretty much the entire day. I suppose it's a nice change from sitting on the plane for almost 20 hours...

We went to Shinjuku today, about a 15 minute train ride from our Youth Hostel. We went shopping in many stores, the most impressive being Takashmaya "Times Square". It is a series of large buildings, almost like a department store but with some departments taking up entire floors, all owned and run by one corporation. You can find anything there, from clothes to electronics to toys to books (there was another 6-floor building full of books, with each floor being comparable in size to a small Borders). In the international section, I managed to find some Bilingual Ah! My Goddess manga. They only had Volumes 3, 4 and 5, but I'm going to try and find the rest elsewhere. Each volume was only 850 yen, which is really cheap compared to the $18-22 Viz charges for the English edition in the US.

After shopping at Times Square for a few hours, we went wandering again and ate lunch at a local soup restaurant. All of the menus were in Japanese, and I don't think anyone spoke English there, but Sang and Liz were able to figure out a good portion of the menu and we ended up ordering fairly standard things. It was really good, and they gave big portions. One interesting thing about Japan is that in public restrooms, no toilet paper is provided. However, there seems to always be small vending machines around that will give you a package of tissue paper for 100 yen. And there are people on the street in some places that are handing out small packages of tissues to everyone that walks by.

We shopped for the rest of the day, and must have walked at least 5 miles. I don't think my feet and legs have been that tired since my marching band days. After spending almost 2 hours at a used video/DVD/music/other stuff store, we ate dinner at McDonalds and headed back to the train station. In the Japanese McDonalds, the food is a little different, like they have a Teriyaki McBurger (which I ordered, couldn't resist). It was pretty good, I wish they served something like that back in the states (with an equally cool name).

I've been trying to pick up as much Japanese as possible on this trip. I've been studying kana - the collective name for two of Japan's written character sets (the others being romaji and kanji). So far I've learned about 20 katakana characters. All kana are fairly simple (and can be drawn with four or less strokes), however both katakana and hiragana contain a total of 46 unique simple sounds and distinct characters. The thing is, the 46 sounds represented by 46 katakana characters are exactly the same 46 sounds represented by the 46 hiragana characters. So, you are basically learning the same alphabet twice. And the hiragana characters are a bit more complicated than the katakana. Confused yet? And this doesn't even take into account the modified characters... Both character sets are used for different things in Japan, the katakana used primarily for emphasis and to represent foreign concepts and terms and the hiragana used to represent things that cannot be represented in kanji or to modify kanji (verb tenses are written in hiragana). As for Japanese phrases, I've learned a few, but memorizing phrases seems to be much harder for me than learning characters of the written language. For some reason, it takes a lot of effort to commit these strings of words to memory. I'm still working on it...

On a final note, someone remind me to NEVER invest in cheap razor blades again... It's pretty bad when after you shave, when you press a tissue to your face you see more than six tiny spots of blood where the stupid thing cut you... And it was a brand new razor only used once! I'm going to toss this thing and pick up a better one at a drug store... Sheesh!