So Judy and I caught the third Harry Potter film this past Saturday. We saw it in style on the “Premier Screen” at the Virgin Cinemas at Roppongi Hills, which is essentially the cinema equivalent to the first class cabin. The seats are large and fully-reclinable, sporting tons of legroom and even end-tables instead of the usual cupholders. Also, in addition to admission to the film, the tickets also afforded us one drink apiece in the Premier Lounge with its nice view of Tokyo. It was a pleasant experience, but a tad pricey at ¥3000 (about $25) a ticket. Probably a decent way to impress a first date, but not something you’d want to do every time you felt like catching a flick. (For the sake of comparison, the standard movie admission price in Tokyo is about ¥1800 per ticket.)

As for the film itself, overall, I’d say I liked it. Some of the dialogue was a bit on-the-nose and at times the exposition was rather blatant, but the film was a solid effort and I was entertained throughout. Judy, of course, was downright enraptured. . .you know, ’cause she’s, like, the big fan and all.

By the way, if you’ve seen the film already, check out this site: Harry Potter and the Prisoner in Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes (contains spoilers). “I think I saw a porno like this once” — brilliant.

The other day I caught the beginning of a program about Harry Potter on TV. As is typical with most Japanese TV shows, there was a main host and alongside him the obligatory talento (TV personalities) — in this case, two women I had never seen before and none other than Guts Ishimatsu, the former boxer-turned-B-list actor and TV personality.

As Guts was the biggest star on the panel (a telling indicator of the crappy production budget), the host began the program by asking him what he knew about Harry Potter. It turned out that old Gutsy had never even heard of the character. Normally, this might lead one to wonder what the heck he is doing appearing on a TV show about Harry Potter, but this is Japan — “the place where logic need not apply” — and so it really wasn’t all that surprising. At that point, the chirpy woman sitting next to Guts chimed in to say that she absolutely loves Harry Potter, and that “Daniel-san is SO CUTE!!!11″ In another feeble attempt to draw attention to the “big star,” the host then asked Guts, “Guts-san, what do you think of Daniel-san?”, to which Guts replied simply “Ma, gaijin da na” (”Well, he’s a foreigner, you know”), prompting laugher all around.

Although I won’t go into depth about my thoughts on the word gaijin at this time, I’ll just say that it’s a discriminatory term and there’s really no need for it to be used when their are several other inoffensive alternatives. While some may argue that gaijin is simply an abbreviation of gaikokujin (foreign national), the true meaning is quite simply “outsider” and carries derogatory connotations. Despite this, many Japanese people continue to use the word freely despite knowing that many non-Japanese people find it offensive.

Anyway, what upset me about Guts’ comment wasn’t only that it was offensive, but that those sorts of comments are shockingly common on Japanese television and never draw any kind of controversy. Just imagine of Alex Rodriguez was asked what he thought of Hideki Matsui and responded with, “Well, he’s a Jap, you know.” There would be an enormous public outcry. In Japan, however, such comments are simply par for the course.

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In lighter news, the new Harry Potter film comes out tomorrow and Judy and I have tickets to see it. I haven’t seen a movie on its opening day since Jurassic Park came out when I was in 8th grade. Of course, Judy was the one who really wanted to get tickets for tomorrow. She’s the Harry Potter fan, not me. She’ll try to deny it, of course, but don’t listen to her.

The ‘about’ page is now up. Why don’t you take a peek?

In April, one of the managers at my company, Soumi-san, invited the company intern, Zach, and I to join him for a day trip to Shizuoka prefecture in central Japan. Shizuoka is known for its excellent views of Mt. Fuji, pleasant weather, sakura ebi (”cherry” shrimp), green tea and strawberries — and we sampled all of it.

Well, actually, make that almost all of it — despite the fact that the weather was absolutely beautiful, some haze prevented us from actually being able to see Mt. Fuji (it was on holiday that day according to Mr. Soumi). However, we were assured that the view is normally quite breathtaking. Despite that itty bitty disappointment, the rest of the day was a lot of fun.

I’ve put some photos from the trip up in the gallery, so please feel free to take a look.

I read today that Tokyo was once again rated the most expensive city in the world. That’s obviously not much of a surprise, of course, seeing as it costs an arm and a leg just for the bare necessities here, which doesn’t leave many other body parts to pay for much of anything else. I try to cope by maintaining the illusion that once I leave Japan everything will seem ridiculously cheap by comparision for the rest of my life, but even self-delusion has its limits.

Over the weekend I worked on trying to set up a gallery for the site. Apparently, I’m starting to get the hang of CSS and PHP (haha, yeah right) because getting the gallery layout to my liking was far less frustrating than originally getting the site set up. I used the Singapore PHP gallery web application, which I suppose is pretty low-tech since it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles a MySQL database would enable (huh?), but it’ll do for the time being.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to prepare any new photos to stick in the gallery, so instead I uploaded some old photos from my August 2002 trip to Hokkaido in northern Japan. Sadly, the originals were all lost when my laptop was stolen last year (must . . . suppress . . . rage), so the images in the gallery are smaller copies. You can access the gallery by clicking on the “photos” link in the menu on the left or go directly to the Hokkaido photos directly by clicking here. The photos are crap, I know, but I’ll try to put some new ones up soon.

Coca-Cola began selling their new C2 cola in Japan this week. They were passing out tiny cans of the stuff at Shibuya station the other morning and last night I gave it a try. To be honest, it tasted like a mix of regular Coke and Diet Coke - definitely an improvement over the nauseating regular diet stuff, but since I’m a skinny bastard and don’t drink soft drinks very often, I don’t really care about reduced calories or carbohydrates so I think I’ll stick with Coke classic.

Will C2 be a success? Probably not in Japan (where Vanilla Coke lasted all of two months), but possibly in the US, where people seem to want to reduce their calorie intake without actually having to reduce the amount of crap that they stuff in their faces.

In other news, I made an attempt to pretty up the site a bit. I think I’ll leave the layout as it is for now, but it’ll definitely remain a work in progress. If you’ve got a second, please let me know what you think.

This post is basically just filler, so feel free to skip it.

When I set out to create this site, I researched a number of different publishing platforms before deciding to go with WordPress due to its supposed ease-of-use and its “great potential” that I kept reading about. Getting WP installed was pretty painless, thankfully, however designing the layout to my liking has actually turned out to be a lot of work. I’ve had to rely on vague recollections from the few programming classes I took in university to do just about everything. There’s probably a much easier way to go about doing things, but seeing as I have cognitive abilities equivalent to those of a rhesus monkey, I’m stuck doing each step one-by-one, which has been a very laborious process.

At any rate, I’m hoping to at least get the layout all set up by next Monday (6/7), and then I’ll see about posting photos and whatnot so this site will have something worth looking at on it. Free free to send me some feedback about the site to email (at) this domain.

Well, until I get everything set up, your patience is much appreciated!

Welcome to the site!

I’m still getting everything set up, but I should have some content up within the next few days.

See you then!