Miscellany

Gentle viewers: this post has absolutely no focus whatsoever. It's essentially going to be a jumble of mostly unrelated thoughts and observations...accompanied by some random photos from the Shijo area which I took a couple of months ago and promptly forgot.

When visiting Loft, a depaato, I found this great collection of digital illustrations/drawings: mostly printed on postcards, but there were a couple of larger prints, and also printed handkerchiefs. I ended up grabbing a bunch of postcards, since they were cheap and I could buy more. Seems I was attracted to two particular artists (or maybe they were the only ones whose work was merchandised there, not sure): Kaori Wakamatsu and Eri Kamijo. You can see some of the Eri Kamijo postcards I bought here and Kaori Wakamatsu's here. Some really beautiful, stunning pieces.

On a musical note, a couple of months ago, my friend Mark introduced me to Kate Covington, aka katethegreat19. She makes covers and does really beautiful arrangements of songs from games, anime, and a few movies. And by makes, I mean that she does the singing and all of the instrumental parts and records it all herself.
Pretty impressive. Just to give you an general idea, here are some of my favorites of her arrangements/covers:
Rose of May, You're Not Alone, both from Final Fantasy IX, Aerith's Theme from Final Fantasy VII, Lament of the Highborne from World of Warcraft, Serenade from Fruits Basket, Once Upon a December from Anastasia, Come Little Children from Hocus Pocus, and the Silent Hill 2 Music Box theme. So, if you hail from Geekland and enjoy music, you might want to check out her channel on YouTube.

While I was sitting in a McDonald's eating dinner sometime the other week, I'll Make a Man Out of You came up on my iPod. It started playing right when a cross-dresser and and his friend (a lady who was not cross-dressing) sat down at the table next to me.
Eheheh.

There have also recently been a couple of hilarious moments of English, er....

faux pas is perhaps too strong of a word...
In my Japanese business and management class several weeks ago, our professor passed around a sheet of paper for us to write down our topics for presentation. When the paper finally came around to me, I took a look to see what other people were doing, out of curiosity. A bunch of the foreign students already had their topics picked out--the Nintendo 64 in Video Games, the Business of Maid Cafes, etc, etc--and then it came to the Japanese students. About four or five Japanese names down the list, each with the words, "I have not it decided" written next to them. Just below theirs was Ben's name--Ben, who was paired with one of the Japanese students for doing the presentation. Seeing as he and his partner hadn't decided what their topic was, he had followed suite in indicating so:

"I have not it decided."

I just about died right in the middle of class.

I've heard multiple accounts of this before, but it continues to be funny for some reason. Usually when one of us international students must turn down an invitation from a Japanese student, for whatever reason, homework, other plans, the typical Japanese text response goes thusly:

"It is so. Then there is no help for it."

It's great, because you know what they're trying to say, or what they would say if they had said it in Japanese: "Sou desu. Shikatanai." What they text to us in English is a direct translation of these expressions, basically, but would perhaps have sounded a lot better as "I see, that's too bad" or "All right, maybe another time." The shikatanai expression is among one of those phrases which reflect the Japanese sense of things being out of their hands. You know how in English we have the active and passive voice? Well, Japanese has several grammatical constructions to express passivity: transitive verbs followed by "-te aru" (which essentially translates to "the thing was verbed"), passive forms of verbs (Someone is/was verbed by someone/something), the causative-passive form of verbs (Someone was made to do verb by someone/something)...While in English writing, our teachers discourage us from using the passive voice too much, in Japanese, using passive expressions makes actions more indirect, and therefore more polite.

"When the storm draws nigh
Dreams will shatter before your eyes
Know that you're not alone
When the battle starts
I will comfort your restless heart
You'll know that you are home"

~You're Not Alone, katethegreat19