Talking Meme: Tokyo!

ran_dezvous asked about my reactions to Tokyo!  I actually live about ninety minutes from Tokyo by bullet train, but my husband has family that lives there so I go there three or four times a year.  Where I live now is a pretty big metropolitan area, but to understand my reactions to Tokyo you have to know that I grew up in a town of 4,000 people.  We had one traffic light in my town (it was a blinking yellow light). I spent my childhood in a place where I could (and did) wander out of my house and into the woods to climb trees and follow the nearby brook along its path.


(my backyard, pretty much)

So when I first went to Meiji Shrine in Tokyo I asked my husband "Is there ever a point when it's not crowded?"


(It was like this).

And he looked around and laughed and said "THIS is when it's not crowded."


(This is when it's crowded!)

I've gotten more used to the crowds in Japan--like I said, we live in a big city, the third-biggest in Japan.  But Tokyo's a totally different sort of thing.  For starters, the sprawl is immense and seems to go on forever.  You could drive for hours and still be in the Tokyo metropolitan area.  And like any fairly old city, the streets tend to be narrow and winding and confusing.  It's REALLY easy to get lost--Google maps has saved me so many times traveling around there.

I like Tokyo a lot!  I have a lot of good memories, and some that may not be good but are certainly memorable.  I visited the cutest cat cafe in the world there!  I've had the best pho I could find in Japan there.  My mother-in-law's ashes are interred there, in the family plot in the temple cemetery near where she grew up, and every year we go there and burn incense and leave flowers and listen to the crows call.  When the big earthquake and tsunami happened, we were visiting Tokyo and had to walk for four hours across town to get back to our hotel; the streets were full of tired, worried people--women limping in high heels, parents carrying toddlers through the night.  We've been line dancing at Little Texas, a country-western bar full of enthusiastic Japanese people in cowboy boots.  It's a wonderful city to visit, and if you find yourself there, let me know and I'll take the train to meet you!

Talking Meme: Detective Conan!

ran_dezvous asked me about Detective Conan, a popular anime here in Japan!

When my husband and I first moved to Japan 15 years ago, we decided to watch some Japanese shows to try and practice our Japanese. One of the shows we chose was Meitantei (Famous Detective) Conan.

This was a terrible choice.

Meitantei Conan is a long-running animated series about a high school boy and amateur detective who, when he runs across the nefarious Black Organization, is given an experimental drug that is supposed to kill him, but (unbeknownst to the villains) de-ages him instead. He decides to pretend to be his own young cousin, taking the name Edogawa Conan (Edogawa sounds like Edgar in Japanese, from Edgar Allen Poe; Conan from Conan Doyle). Through a rather convenient set of plot devices, he eventually moves in with his semi-girlfriend Mouri Ran (who doesn't know who he is) and her incompetent detective father Mouri Kogoro. While searching for the secret of the Black Organization, he ends up helping Kogoro solve crimes by using a special dart that puts Kogoro to sleep at convenient times and a microphone that lets him impersonate and throw Kogoro's voice. Kogoro starts to become famous as "The Sleeping Detective" who solves crimes while in a sleep-like trance (it's Conan solving them, but Kogoro is happy to take the credit and even kind of believes he's doing it somehow).

It's a great show, but it's a terrible show to to be practicing your Japanese with, because a lot of the cases revolve around language riddles, and...wow, Japanese is not an easy language for that. So after a while we had to kind of give up watching it unsubbed, but years later we came back to it, because we had liked the characters and the conceit! We’re not caught up anymore, but for a while we were watching it very regularly. I think we’ll get back to it at some point, once the English subs have made some progress--we’re too invested in the long-term overarching plot not to find out how it all gets wound up someday...