New Job

Ok so after doing a little bit of research, I stumbled upon an in-progress translation for Jump Ultimate Stars that currently needs a lot of help in the translation department. A couple of the programmers changed the font so that it displays in half-width (8 pixels across instead of 16) instead of a true Variable Width Font. Subsequently after a little font hacking, the text looks really good compared to what it used to be. Anyhow, other people are going to be left to the graphic and programming hacking, while I will be the current lone translator on the project. Apparently all of the others lost interest and left. I also played around a little bit with the beta of the game and it seems that all of the main text is translated... But very badly. The grammar is pretty bad and there are spelling mistakes all over. I want to work on fixing that part up first, but the group leader is going to have me finish the parts still in Japanese. Cool. Introduction into the translation world!

In other news, I left my DS at home today. I don't know what I was thinking, but it must have been something along the lines of "Hey now that my camera is working, I'll take tons of pictures instead!!" Yeah, no. It didn't work out that way. I went to Anthro class in the morning which only had about half attendance because of Golden Week. It was also good because the class was only 2 hours long instead of the normal 3. For the rest of the time I chatted with Nick and "4 letter name guy" who let me join their group. After that I met Michael for the pizza buffet at Shakey's. For Japanese pizza it is pretty good. The price is especially good at lunch time, but way overpriced otherwise. I enjoyed probably 2 entire pizza's worth of food, along with 2 huge glasses of water, and many, many potato skins. Needless to say I walked out of there happy ^_^

We then planned on meeting Daniel and playing some DS when "OH NO!" I left mine at home... I instead exchanged money at the bank and went to the Igo club to ask about buying a board. Sadly the owner was not much help. He told me to ask the other club members. Gah! So Michael and I eventually met Daniel at Toyama Park and talked for a good 2 hours. At this point Michael decided to return home, I had some books to buy, and Daniel had different books to buy. We parted our separate ways.

So I finally got my Japanese books for this semester. One of them looks pretty decent. It is by the Japan Times entitled 中級から上級へ日本語 which means "from middle to high level Japanese." The other book is the continuation of the listening book which I absolutely loath. Maybe it will be better this semester.... Maybe.... After this I stopped by the local book off and picked up $20 worth of books (that's 20 books folks). Some of the notable ones were the original Japanese version of Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". I figure that since I have already read them in English, the Japanese version would be easier to read. On the way home I read a little bit of the first one, understood most of it, but there are still many kanji I do not know. Work work work right?

Oh yeah, yesterday I stayed home most of the day. My host family took me and Fabian out to sushi at this place that is apparently famous. It is called "Bidori Sushi" and I do not know the Kanji. It looked really expensive, but as expected was really really delicious!

Gasp!! Out of the House!!

I made it out of the house on Sunday and Monday! Sunday I wanted to check out Shimokitazawa because my group in Anthropology is doing a video about it. I figure that I should get my bearings and at the very least see what was there. Vaso decided to come along on my journey. We walked around talking and checking out all the little allyways filled with stores. I was on a mission to buy an Igo board and some sandals. I specifically wanted sandals because it is getting close to summer. Oddly enough, we stopped by a kimono store and I ended up buying some cheap traditional sandals. They are pretty sweet. I also wanted to get a belt for my yukata, but they cost way more than the sandals did. Come on! It is a long piece of cloth!

We wandered around and ended up at an okonomiyaki place that had a huge line in front of it. It had to be good right? We got in line and waited almost 40 minutes before entering the building. The waitress took our order while we were still standing in line, but we still had to wait another 10 minutes for them to cook our "all mix" okonomiyaki. It was really cool because everyone was sitting in a bar-like setting around a giant hot frying pan. The cooks made all of the food in front of everybody. I must say that our okonomiyaki was the best I have tasted outside of Osaka. It was more like Hiroshima okonomiyaki because it had soba in the middle.

Later on, we went to Shinjuku in search of an Igo board. I had previously seen one at the Tokyu Hands in Takeshimaya, so that was our first stop. After wandering the 13 floor department store for about an hour, we finally found the board game section. To my dissapointment, the go boards that they had were really cheap with plastic stones. Needless to say I did not buy one. I emailed a couple friends from my club and they told me to ask the owner of the go place next time I go. Good idea. Anyway, Vaso and I bought some candy then decided to go home. It was too dark to go to Yoyogi park and we wanted to get home for dinner.

Monday was a little more interesting. I woke up early and started on my laundry. Soon after I got an email from Sheung Sheung saying that her plans had been cancelled and she was free to hang out with me. The only catch is that she is lazy and would not be out of the house until 2pm. Fine with me.

I spent the morning researching rom translation. Over the summer I tried my hand at some simple text translation of the GBA game Mother 3. It was going fairly well as I had the bulk of the pause and battle menu translated. Then I ran into the problem of actually inserting other code into the game. There is this thing called Variable Width Text (VWF) which English uses and Japanese doesn't. It basically means that all Japanese characters fit into a 16x16 pixel box, while in English the characters will be closer or further apart depending on how big the character is. For instance, typing 3 "i"s will take up less space than typing 3 "o"s. This poses the problem that English text looks terrible when using the Japanese system. Anywho, I never got around to learning how to program and gave up on the project. I was also pressed for time preparing to come to Japan.

So this time around I have started the translation of a game called Jump Ultimate Stars for the DS. At the moment no DS translation has been finished. Also, I wanted to choose a game that nobody else has started on (the Mother 3 translation is well underway.) I spent all morning on Monday figuring out where the text is stored and the control codes to access them. This will pose a slightly bigger problem than my previous attempt because the game uses kanji. Not only is there the 52 roman alphabet, the 100 katakana and hiragana, but also the 2000+ kanji. There may not be that many actually used in the game, but after looking at the code they are all there. Hopefully I will be able to develop a pattern as to automatically fill in all the kanji instead of me finding the code for each one.

Anyhow, I made some good progress and this morning got to the point where I could insert my own text. Here is a screenshot of the first working English text insertion:



As you can see, each English letter is taking up a "block" of space making it look bad and not allowing very long sentences. My current goal is to get all of the text from the game dumped into a nice little text file for easy translation. Once that is done, I will worry about figuring out all the VWF stuff. This stuff is fun I swear!!!

Back to Monday ^_^

I met up with Sheung Sheung at 3pm in Harajuku only to find out that the Snoopy store is no longer there! It has been replaced by a clothes store instead!! Lame. We did not spend any time in Harajuku, but instead walked through Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu. It was nice and peaceful. After that we decided to walk to Shinjuku as Sheung Sheung wanted to buy a camera. Her old one is broken apparently. We walked all the way to the Yodobashi Camera and she spent the next hour browsing the different models of cameras, finally decided on a brand that I had never heard of before. I like my Cannon ultra portable cameras!

Next up was dinner. I wanted to go to Shin-Okubo to check out the Korean restaurants so we started walking. The Korean food was all really expensive, running from 1500 - 2000 yen a meal!!! That being out of both of our price ranges, we hit up a local Chinese place instead for some Gyoza and Noodles. Finally, we figured that since it was close, we might as well just walk to Takadanobaba as well. We stopped by the Mister Donut for desert and headed towards the station. We decided to play billiards along the way and I knew of a couple places right near the station. We chose a random one and got right in. Sheung Sheung is fairly good at pool. She beat me the first two games and I won the second two. At this our hour was up so we decided to leave it as a tie and head home. For being a student, we both got discounts, but because Sheung Sheung is a girl, she got an extra discount! Lame! I can pass as a girl right?

Waterlogged Camera

So I don't remember if I mentioned that after bringing my camera back home and charging the battery, it turned on! Well at least it still kinda worked. The screen was completely white, but I could still take pictures I thought. Being very careful (cause who knows what a waterlogged camera will do!) I locked the memory card and managed to extract all the pics to my computer. Oh what a sweet day that was! So then I put my camera away and started naming all the pictures...

So today I decided to take another crack at it. I finally found a screwdriver at home that was small enough to take out the screws and got to work. It was a simple operation really. After taking the casing off, I disconnected and then reconnected the cables to the screen. I found out that when I put it back together previously, I had not pushed the cables in all the way, hence the white screen. I turned it on and viola!!! My camera is back and working again! I am not exactly sure for how long it will work, but I will use it until it dies. When turning it on the gears to push out the lens make a slightly more screeching sound than they did before. It is like the gears are starting to rust or something. There really isn't anything I can do about that at this point. Let's just hope that it keeps working!

And here is the picture to prove that it is working again:

And Days Go Bye

First of all I will not let this weekend turn out like the last one. Although, it is already looking like it...

Friday was sadly just a normal day around campus. Before I got to campus I emailed all my friends to see who could hang out over the weekend. During the course of the day, replies trickled in. The majority of them saying "I am not free sorry." It's gonna be another weekend by myself.

In Japanese class I had to give a presentation about my hometown of Bryan. I found it to be really weird that we are doing them at the beginning of second semester instead of first. Anyhow, two people (John and I,) along with some technical difficulties took up the entire first hour of class. Kelly was supposed to give her speech too, but her powerpoint was not working. If it were me I would have done it anyway. During the end of class, Taiki showed up to watch the presentations. Since they were already over, we spent the last 45 minutes simply talking about the differences between Japanese and other schools. For lunch John, Taiki, and I grabbed bento and ate in the 22 lounge.

I also stopped by Michiyo's office to get my money for my teiki. It is depressing to think that I only have 3 months left here! I don't need to get anymore money for my transportation from here on out!

So I went to my other 2 classes and then over to Go club. This time I played a bunch of games on the 13x13 board, and managed to do fairly well with only a 3 stone handicap. I still need to learn more of the basics of expanding and protecting.

Saturday was sadly the same as last weekend... I have an excuse though! It was raining and difficult to get out of the house. Instead I tried finishing all my homework for the weekend (which failed btw.) I did get to play some games and watch some TV.

I will leave the house today. Somewhere around 1pm sounds about right.

Drink Drink Drink!!

On Wednesday I went to Japanese class in the morning, hung around the lounge during the afternoon, and eventually made it to Takadanobaba to meet with the Igo club. They were holding their yearly party to celebrate the new members to the club. I met up with them at 5:30 at the rotary. Once everyone got together, we went to the nearby Izakaya. There were a ton of people there! With about 10 new members and 30 existing ones, we took up an entire room and then some. One of the non-members who attended was this French guy who went by the name of Juan. He is in Tokyo for 2 weeks and apparently is really good at Igo. The bad part is that he does not know any Japanese above "hello" so I ended up translating for him a part of the time.

The party mainly consisted of people introducing themselves the entire time. Of course, this was not the normal introduction, but the drinking-game introduction. It went a little something like this. One person stood up and downed whatever was in their glass. If they drank it too fast they were poured another glass and forced to do it again. Next they said their name, hometown, major, and what they hope to obtain in the coming year. After naming one of those, for instance and engineering major, all the engineering majors stood up and had a toast. This went on until about 8pm. Needless to say, everyone drank too much. We toasted to world peace, getting stronger at Igo, graduating on time, living in Tokyo, having new members, etc. Pretty much anything and everything was made into a toast. There was also some pretty decent food like yakisoba and karage which I took full advantage of. Once we got kicked out of the place, I was extremely surprised to find that I was not expected to pay anything. I nice nomikai like this and I don't have to pay? They said that it is the only time that they all go out drinking so it is alright.

Next was the second party. In my experience, the second party consists of going to karaoke, bowling, puri-kura, ect. This time they wanted to go out drinking more. I figured what the hey? It is still early and I will probably never see all of them smashed like this, so I decided to tag along. The second party was the same deal as the first, but everyone sat around socializing (or sleeping). I was glad to see that there was much less alcohol and much more food. Also, nobody managed to get sick, which is amazing in my book. Once again they told me not to pay...

Finally 11pm rolled around and we had to get going. Some people opted to go to the 3rd party, which happened to be all night karaoke. Under any other circumstances, I would have gone, but I had 1-3 period classes in the morning. It was already bad enough that I would get home past midnight. If I went, there would be no way to make it to class.

Today I woke up bright and early... Hungover of course. I seriously thought about skipping classes, but because I opted out of karaoke, I made myself get out of bed. In class this morning we went to the library to watch video's on different matsuri around Japan. Everyone broke into groups of two in order to choose a matsuri and do a 10 minute presentation about it. John Bruggers and I chose to do a taiko drum matsuri that takes place in Fukuoka. We only got the first minute or so of the 8 minute clip fully understood when our time was suddenly up. It was time to get back to doing real class. We had three Japanese helpers come in to teach us about characteristics ad personalities. I was put into a group with a girl named Yosshi. She described herself as being shy but positive. I described her as a person who likes music.

After class was over, Ren, Yosshi, and I went out to lunch. It was more like we bought bento and found a bench outside, but still, lunch! I found out that she really does like music, mostly the heavier rock and metal types. I am more of a lighter rock fan, but am willing to listen to anything. She eventually invited Ren and I to go see a concert with her. Nice. We exchanged phone numbers before heading off to class.

Sakurai Sensei's class is still the best thing ever. They guy is really interesting because he tells stories of his childhood that relate to the topic at hand. For instance, "You ask a priest what [nothingness] is and he will respond: nothingness is nothingness!" Interesting stuff about Buddhism. A person who is enlightened is called a Buddha. Once that person dies, they become a kami (god) and float around... Or do whatever kami like to do in their free time. This is by far my favorite class.

I went to the lounge, played FFCC with Michael and Daniel for about an hour, and talked with people who came in and out. I was going to go home, but decided to go to Igo and play a couple of games instead. I got to play against a new member today who was stronger than me. With a 5 stone handicap I only lost by 5 points. If I would have played in the spot to create a "net" I would have won by a landslide. I lost a huge group of stones in the beginning which I was not able to make up for. I will get better at Igo! Kanpai!

Good Weather = Good Day

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today! For me at least, it felt like t-shirt weather at a whopping 23 degrees! The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and most importantly there was no rain!

As usual, I was a bit late getting to class this morning. Ok well that is not entirely true. When I got to campus I spent a good five minutes talking to Steve in front of the Okuma statue. This became an every morning thing last semester, and looks like it will this time too. If I am late to campus, I am obviously late to class. If I am early to campus, I talk to Steve which makes me late for class. It is a win-win situation! Today was a rare day in Japanese class because I had to explain why I was late. I came to class 5-10 minutes late every day last semester and the teacher didn't say anything. She didn't even take it out of my attendance. So nice of her! This morning I also ran into none other than Shohei, one of the volunteers who helped us at the beginning of the year (Asuka being another one.) He is taking a law class which sounds pretty tough.

For lunch I met up with a giant group of people. The original plan was to have lunch with just Asuka, but from the looks of it, there were going to be 10+ people instead. Luckily, due to Steve's sister being in town, most of the group went with him. I stayed with Asuka and Sonja to have a nice and peaceful lunch. Too bad all the restaurants and bento places were packed. Asuka said it was because of all the new freshman... Figures... We eventually bought some snacks at the Coop and ate them on a bench in the middle of campus. Asuka taught me a little Miyazaki-ben (it is a small town way down in Kyushu). 食べちょちゃわ equals 食べている. Weird stuff!

Asaka went to class after we ate so I ended up talking to Sonja for the next hour. I had time to kill and nobody else was around. When she left for home, I read my book for another hour. Finally, Michael mailed me and asked if I wanted to play some Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles in the lounge. I did that for the next hour.

In the lounge I also got to meet some new people, namely this girl who goes by the name of Emily. She can speak 5 languages fluently (or well enough to communicate anyway), originally from Thailand, went to school in China, and now going to college in Japan. She looks and acts a lot like Shoko which I found to be comforting. I could almost predict what she was going to say about what I thought. Anyway, when asked about what I was doing in Japan, I gave her the rundown. Her response was simply:

"Well you chose the wrong country."

I chose the wrong country? Really? Sure Japan has its flaws, sure I hate Tokyo, but the wrong country? I suppose she is more able to say something like that because she has lived in other Asian and European countries before. It is just that she is the first person I have heard say that Japan sucks. Almost all other people hail Japan as being the capital of the would or so it seems. After that I pretty much decided that I needed to get to know her better. Really? A bad place? There has to be some deeper reasoning to that.

Luckily she wanted to go to the engineering campus and I happened to be there to take her. We walked, talked, got lost, and found the building she was going to. There I got to meet one of her Chinese Computer Science friends who could not speak English very well. He seemed like a pretty cool guy. So after this I told them I had to go to Igo club and departed. Before leaving campus however, I thought "what the hey?" and visited Yoshimoto Sensei in his office. Michiyo Sensei also happened to be there so I talked a little about the practicum. Fun stuff. I was told that I should visit more often to have fun and stuff.

Lastly, I made it to the Igo club. There were a surprisingly large number of people there. I ended up playing Tomo san a couple of times on the 9x9 board. I lost the first to times with a 0 and 2 stone handicap, but with 3 stones I managed to beat her. With that she told me that they were having a nomikai tomorrow and I was welcome to come. Cool, I may have to do that. Upon exchanging email addresses, I returned home.

Eyaaaaaaa!!!!

I finally made it out of the house today!!! This deserves a round of applause! *cue cricket noises*

.....Ok ok I guess it is not that big of news, but after a weekend of staying in, it was good to get out of the house. I have been chilling at home doing Japanese homework and playing on my beloved DS. I have missed quite a few games since January that I need to catch up on. There is also this book that Steve lent me called "Dance Dance Dance" by Haruki Murakami. I have made it about halfway through in the past few days. It involves this guy who is recently divorced, works in Tokyo, and trying to piece his life back together. Of course there are a ton of strange and obviously fictional events, but everyone needs to have a quirky side.

So today I got a load of laundry done (clean sheets!) and took a shower. I had been really lazy the past two days as well... I had previously emailed everyone to see what they were doing and from the replies I got made tentative plans. However, what I actually did for the day turned out to be completely different.

First of all I headed to Waseda and ran into Larisa and Eric. They told me that they were going to get some curry for lunch and I was welcome to join. Sweet. I was just going to eat at the Coop. It was the first time I had been to Malibar during lunch. The special is that you get as much Nan (bread) as you want as long as you are sitting in the store. Usually you get one piece per bowl of curry and then have to buy more if you want it. Needless to say I got my fill for the day. We finally got a chance to talk about what happened over spring break. I told my story about the daycare, they told theirs about the schools, and all was right with the world. It seems that everyone had a good time outside of Tokyo. Sad that we all had to return...

Anyway, the next thing on my agenda was to return two books to the SILS library that will be overdue soon. When I was maybe 50 meters away from the building, a large group including Steve, Kyle, Sonja, and Steve's sister Emily flagged me down. Emily is staying in Tokyo for the week to visit Steve. Their tentative plans involved going to Ueno Park and exploring that area. Sure why not? I've got nothing else planned for the day so I'll go! We headed for the local train station down the same path that I had just traversed the past 20 minutes. Not only had we just started when my favorite friend Asuka shows up going the other direction. I have not seen her in ages! Everyone spent a good half hour talking to her. The most interesting part was translating between Asuka and Emily. Some context really gets lost during translation. びっくりした！ and "I was surprised" just doesn't have the same feel from one language to the other.

Anyway, we got to Ueno and puttered around there for a while. The final stop on our journey was a large toy shop where Emily bought some souvenirs for someone at home. I jumped on a deal and bought a large stuffed pokemon named "Achamo". I don't know what the name is in English, but it is a fire starter that looks like a bird possibly from the advance series if anyone wants to help me out (Ed or Logan). From then on, Steve had to go to a meeting with his doctor friends. Kyle and I stayed around to "babysit" Emily. We went to Asakusa and checked out the thunder gate along with all those other little shops. An hour and a half later we met up with Steve at Ochanomizu and went out for Mexican food. I had a margarita and Enchilada which were surprisingly good. The only thing is, the portions were small and they were expensive. Ugh! I hate Japanese restaurants for that! I bought ice creme before heading home ^_^