The Otaku Report, Vol. 1

As you already know, among all the things I was looking forward to about living in Japan, one of the highest on my list was access to that good otaku life.  In other parts of the world, you have to wait around for the local anime convention (ie, AnimeIowa) or else instigate your own (for example, the nerd nights I planned at ASU with my favorite weebs.  Here in Japan, there needs be no special occasion - it's happening all around you.  You could, just for example, be sitting at the Shinjuku Express Bus Terminal and see a tall person of indeterminate gender walk past wearing high-heeled, studded boots and a kick ass outfit with those Sailor Moon-style twin buns in their hair (which may, in fact, have just happened.  Cosplay in Yoyogi Park is a regularly occurring thing, and if you find yourself walking on the streets (literally - they close it to traffic) of Akihabara on a Sunday, who knows what you will come across...last time it was some sort of gaming thing, which - not really being a gamer - I knew nothing about but still found interesting.

Before I got here I learned about Sora News through a friend who'd been living up in Sendai.  It often lures me in with a story, and on the side I'll see something exciting that I want to check out, only to find out that it's long since passed.  The good news is that most of the new stuff I've caught, and it's been fun.

For starters, I got to see Mikazuki Munechika in the...well, steel.  I mentioned the anime about boys turned into swords at least once before, and while Touken Ranbu isn't my favorite - it just seems like such a waste of cute boys to not have any hint of romance - but I have a healthy appreciation for both swords and cute boys, so, you know, it works.  Mikazuki Munechika is one of the five great swords of Japan, and considered to be the most beautiful because of a crescent pattern in the steel thanks to the way it was forged.  He's owned by the Tokyo National Museum, and they had him out on display this summer, so one weekend I went up to Ueno Park to check him out.  I got there a little after the museum opened, and went straight for the sword room - apparently all the fujoshis have been lined up taking shit tons of pictures, and I hate lines, but there were just a few women ahead of me when I got there, so all was well.  I couldn't really see the crescent pattern - it's supposed to be subtle enough that it really doesn't come out in photographs - but it was a pretty cool sword.  Not sure that it was any more beautiful than any of the other swords in the room, but maybe I'm not very discerning.

Along with that, I found out that there was a Touken Ranbu musical coming up in November.  Flower Boy posted that he'd purchased tickets for the Sailor Moon musical right before I came to Japan, and I had all sorts of feelings about that.  First jealousy, because I love musicals and plays and all of that.  Second, I was a little miffed because it was Sailor Moon, and although I watched about 10 episodes - it's a shoujo classic - I couldn't really get into it.  Maybe I'm too old.  At any rate, I wasn't going to shell out for Usagi-chan.  And finally, I was a little wary, because if live action movies are bad, would a musical be worse?  When I found out that there was a Touken Ranbu musical, I decided I'd find out for myself.  I diligently marked the day that tickets went on sale and went online to buy my tickets at the appointed hour.

And then my bank decided this was a great time to decide it was suspicious that I was ordering tickets in Japan, and blocked the purchase.  By the time I had called them and set them straight, tickets were all sold out.  Again the mix of emotions...I was PISSED that they chose that time to block my card.  On the other hand, while I was scrolling through the ticket order pages I found out that there was also an Ao No Exorcist stage show, and if Touken Ranbu is specially formulated to appeal to women who like beautiful men who aren't interested in women, Ao No Exorcist is not.  It is pretty much straight up shounen...and it wasn't sold out.

So last night saw me hoofing it after work up to Roppongi, where the theater was located (this also worked out well - the musical was at the Tokyo Dome, and I would've hated to try to make it up there and back after a long day of work.  It wasn't exactly a walk in the park, though, because I'd realized when I was looking at the email during school that you're not supposed to use the English, foreigner's site if you're living in Japan - there was something in the email about having to bring your passport, so I wasn't super happy to have to run home for it.  Fortunately they didn't look through it to see whether or not I was here on a visa - the picture page was enough bonafides for them (phew!)  I got my ticket, went past whatever swag they were selling - DVD's, postcards of the cast, t-shirts, whatever - and found my seat.  And then looked around.  With the exception of the stinky foreign guy on my right, it seemed like the entire audience was female.  Like, you'd have to go to a women-only screening of Wonder Woman to find an audience with that ratio of ladies to men.  It was a little crazy.

The show was interesting.  It didn't seem to have any overlap with the first or second season of the anime, and I haven't read the manga so I'm not sure if the story was canon, but whatever.  Kamiki gets kidnapped, Shima is up to something twisted - I wasn't entirely sure why, because it was in Japanese.  Now, of course it was in Japanese, but for some reason this came as a bit of a shock to me.  No supertitles.  No helpful notes in the program.  But if you can follow an opera in a foreign language, a movie or a play aren't that much more of a challenge.  And the best parts - the action, and a lot of the comedy - you didn't need to understand the language for.  And I think that's what made this a success as a play - there's a lot of room to play with special effects when your main character is the son of Satan and he wields blue flames.  The actual staging of it was impressive, too - I couldn't believe what they were able to do with a projector, several stair pieces, and two platform things.  It kind of made me wish I was working on a musical this year.

A couple of weeks before, I was shopping at my favorite place, the Daiso store (have I mentioned this before?  I need to start a weekly, "Things I bought at Daiso," post).  And the muzak playing over the speakers, I suddenly realized, was familiar.  In fact, I heard it again last night at the play - the second opening song for Ao No Exorcist.  I hope there's a special hell for people who use good music like that for nefarious purposes.  Cause it sucked.

My final report comes from a gallery stationed at the aforementioned Tokyo Dome.  In fact, I teased the poster for this exhibition back when I was writing about rabbits...in a little more than a month the live action production of Fullmetal Alchemist is being released here, and Japan is great at promoting.  They have nendoroids coming out (Ed, Al, and Colonel Mustang), a new chapter of the manga is rumored to be a freebie when you watch the movie, and they had a big art exhibition featuring covers, pages, and at least a couple of interactive displays. 

It was legit.  I haven't really written about just how damn well Japan uses light and sound in art, but they've got it down.  My favorite was a room painted to look like Ed and Al's house, which had the alchemy circles projected onto the floor and Ed and Al's voices recorded - it really brought you into the moment. 

Much more creepy was the projection - hiding around a corner, so it catches you off guard - of Selim Bradley peeking out of blinking, watching shadows.  Unfortunately for most of the exhibition you weren't allowed to take photos, because I wanted to TAKE ALL THE PHOTOS.  I feel like there should be some sort of exception made for art teachers when it comes to that rule, because we are educating the world's future artists and we need to be able to show them examples of what we are talking about. 

Instead I bought the book - which I would have done anyway if any museum type people are reading this - which had all the gorgeous color paintings in it.  It was well-worth the 1500 yen admission price, and even worth the hour I stood in line waiting to get in, although I would have enjoyed it more if there hadn't been quite so many people.  FMA is one of those stories that kicks you in the teeth every time because it is just SO good.  I read the manga back in the fall of 2014, went back and watched the anime in the summer of 2016, and walking through the art of it made me want to do it all over again...I'll probably even break down and watch the live action movie, because even if that is the one thing about animation that America does better than Japan, it comes with a free, new chapter, so even if it sucks it's not a total loss.  Even if the movie isn't great, the characters - particularly the women - are top notch.  When the nieces get a little older I'm definitely showing them Fullmetal Alchemist, because whether they want to be mechanics, generals, snipers, or just housewives, there's a badass role model in there for them.  If you're in Tokyo and you want to check it out, you've got one more week to do it - aim for morning or late afternoon, the line was lethal when I got there at one.

So that concludes the first volume of the Otaku Report.  I meant to finish last night but after a long ride down to Okayama on the Willer Bus and a full day of slogging through the typhoon, when I got to my hostel I kind of passed out.  Which is a shame, because it has a gorgeous Japanese garden, and I'm currently wrapping this up sitting at my first kotatsu (a little because it's chilly, but mostly because I'm trying to dry out my hoodie some - I'd do the same with my shoes but I don't want to stink up the place).  There are castles, temples, creepy doll villages, and - of course - art in the near future as I head into Shikoku and eventually to Hiroshima over the next week.

My Big, Fake, Greek Wedding

I've never taken a ferry in Greece before.  I've been to Santorini, but it always seemed to me like a waste of time to spend all that time on a boat when I could be there in less than an hour on a plane.  Well, I've learned my lesson.  Leaving Santorini we took Ryanair which is supposed to be a budget airline but they tack on all these fees for luggage and not doing online check-in and shit.  Ryanair sucks big donkey balls...which brings me back to Santorini.

Well, this time we took a ferry, to get from Crete to Santorini.  Bronte couldn't meet us at the port, but her friend Flora, proprietor of the Flower Pension - where we were staying - sent a driver to pick us up.  Bronte has a thing about signs and me, and wanted him to bear one inscribed similar to the one she and my Dark Lord made nine years ago.  Flora talked her down to one that read, "Slutty M_(my last name)_."

(If you are a newer reader, please understand that I am not slutty, nor is Bronte "Yellow trash," as I sometimes address her.  These are the kinds of jokes that sprout in the sweatshop environment known as hagwon teaching in Korea).

We dropped our stuff at the Pension and headed along the caldera to Bronte's apartment (which I can admit now to being very slightly worried I wouldn't be able to find.  I found it without a problem, but hey, it was 2011 the last time I was there).  Bronte and Vasilis are - let's call a spade a spade - way too cool to be my friends, and yet, they are.  They are also night owls (like I used to be before 11 years of teaching made me otherwise) which meant they'd just gotten up by the time we got over there, and we headed down to Katharos for a big, Greek feast.  It was kind of an overcast, cruddy sort of day, and Bronte was worried that it wasn't nice enough to sit outside, but the three of us have lived in Mongolia long enough that a little wind and rain ain't no thing.

After stuffing ourselves and a quick donkey drive-by (we wanted to be sure Five got that checked off her list), B and V drove us down to Ammoudi Bay.  We'd already told them how much they were looking forward to taking the hike from Oia to Fira that starts steps away from the Flower Pension, so they decided they should hike up the cliffs behind me to the windmills.  Five and Engrish were all for it (I, on the other hand, had eaten about two dozen dolmades within the hour previous and had a food baby to think of...I rode to the top with Bronte and Vasilis.  But the next time I'm in Santorini...)

I also sat out of the next day's aforementioned hike.  I've been to Fira before and Bronte and me had some catchin' up to do, sitting by the pool and eating yet more amazing Greek food.  That night, though, Flora had arranged for us all to go to The White Door, a dinner theater centered around a traditional Santorini wedding set in the 1940s.  Flora had been several times already that year, and had a blast every time.  This was a new experience for me, and even being foreigners and not that familiar with the culture we enjoyed the show.  Especially the part where we got to smash the plates.  Honestly though, the food was not as satisfying as I've come to expect from Greece, so I was happy to know that we were heading out to dinner (at the altogether reasonable hour of 9) later.

Where we met up again with B and V's friend, Kostas.  Let me be honest with you.  Kostas came to Katharos that blustery afternoon for lunch, and we all fell a little in love with him - cute, smoldering brown eyes, "the body of a Greek god!" as the mother in the White Door performance kept proclaiming.  I'm not going to try to justify the fact that all three of us were infatuated with the poor guy - I'll just say we live in Asia and leave it at that. 

I'm telling you all that as a preface to what happened next.  Five, who is the most reserved, most modest, least attention-seeking person I've ever met (I didn't nickname her "Mother Teresa" for nothing), agreed to go out dancing.  None of are exactly the busting-a-move type (although I do like a good hafla), but it was our last night in Greece and we were accompanied by the descendant of Adonis, so damned if we didn't go get our groove on, at least for a little while.  Finally Bronte and Vasilis drove us back to the Flower Pension, where we said some teary farewells (me because I love that yellow trash like my own sister, them because after weeks of me promising them how hot Greek men were, they'd finally met one and were feeling jilted that we were leaving) and extracted promises that they would come visit us in Mongolia.  Then we sat up for a while, packing and reminiscing and eating the baklava Bronte bought for me that afternoon on our joyride.

The Play's the Thing

A bunch of my friends are posting things they're grateful for all this month on Facebook.  I'm not that ambitious, but I WILL say, right now, that I am grateful for Five's incredible powers of observation.  Right in the heart of UB is a big red building, housing the National Academic Drama Theater of Mongolia.  I've walked past it at least a few times every week, but never given it much thought.  Well, over Greek food last week, Five asked what H looks like in Cyrillic, because she noticed the banners on the outside of the theater, and was pretty sure Hamlet was coming to town.  Well, as a matter of fact, it looks like this -> X, and even though the posters actually said "Gamlet," sure enough, that was the play the National Theater was opening the season with.  Don't ask me what ELSE they're playing this year, because the website is kind of a mess, but their production was awesome, even if it was in Mongolian.

However, since the website IS a mess it was a chore finding out anything about it.  I inspected the banners earlier this week, and wrote down a couple of phone numbers listed.  When I called one, I got the response of, "My English is no," so I asked our office Wonder Woman to give them a call and find out the particulars, then went into town to get us tickets (15,000 - 50,000 tugrugs).  This was a challenge as well, since the ticket office is not clearly marked.  I tried the front doors (all locked), then went in the side door, where I was told to go to the little red building to the side that I assumed was a guard house.  After going into that via the wrong door, and then running out to an ATM when I found out they couldn't accept my card, I FINALLY bought tickets.  I told the lady working there that I needed 6 tickets for Saturday.  She might have been English-is-No lady, because she sold me 6 tickets for Sunday, but we didn't figure that out until they were seating us, and as a result, we ended up in the theater box on stage left.  We were so close we could see the actors spray their glottal stops, but it made it really hard to see what was happening further back, since we had a piece of the set in our way.

I'm not sure what period the director had in mind, based on their sets and costumes.  The actresses were wearing glitzy formals that would not have gone amiss at a senior prom, and the men - mostly - had military style jackets.  A few notable exceptions were Claudius (who tromped around in a long black leather duster with red velour-looking pants and dark sunglasses), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who were dandied up with long, dangly rhinestone earrings and blingy rhinestone Michael Jackson gloves), and Gertrude (whose dress looked more like a robe, and showed off her thigh-high stockings and long, shapely MILF legs).  As I mentioned before, the whole thing was performed in Mongolian, which made me grateful for my high school AP English teacher, the Magnificent Mrs. Driml...otherwise I might not have had a clue as to what was going on!  Hamlet himself is above, and the actor, L. Jamsranjav, did an excellent job portraying his "madness," although in the other two staged productions I saw, he did a lot less crotch-grabbing, boob-fondling, and dry humping - the scene with his mother was particularly more explicit.

I LOVED how they handled the play-within-a-play scene.  Mongolia has a tradition of contortionism (remember?  I mentioned it in Song and Dance and Dog and Pony), and they integrated this into the play.  While the king and queen frolic in the front of the stage, other figures are doing likewise in silhouettes projected onto a silk screen.  Really interpretive and beautiful, if not exactly traditional.  Ophelia was portrayed by A. Ganchimeg, and while she was pathetic enough while being rebuffed by Hamlet, she really shone after Polonius' murder drives her mad.  She was a damn fine actress.

The play ran without an intermission, which was too bad because I started nodding off during Yorick's big scene, although I pulled it together for the big finale...which is good because I would have felt cheated if I'd missed seeing Laertes pull his wig off to reveal his mohawk (which Lit said reminded her of a Naadam wrestler's hairstyle) before his duel with Hamlet.  After retrieving our coats we saw people on the stage in the theater, and decided to go take a look, where we got invited onto the stage and asked by a camera crew what we thought about Gamlet (I'm just waiting for my students to tell me they saw me on tv saying, "VERY GOOD!")  It was a lot of fun - good friends, good actors, good production (even if we didn't get to hear the Bard's beautiful verse).