...a buck for a little can of tea or pop is considered cheap. Or 17000円 for a used PS2 looks like a steal. They're not kidding when they say that Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world to live in. And you know why it's also one of the most populated? It's totally worth it. Quite a small price to get into heaven, if you think about it.


June 25th

Mitsuda house

Today, we got to go to the Anime Museum that I forwent in favor of the tea ceremony. We stopped at a Japanese spaghetti shop on the way for lunch... it really is a different experience when you eat it with chopsticks, but it was delicious all the same. Ryan was there with me, Mayumi, and Take at the museum. It was pretty cool... they had a little history area, showing the different eras of anime. There's the prehistoric times of Astro Boy and Lupin III, the BC 70s and early 80s of numerous mecha anime which no one cares about (Before Cordell), the New Testament of anime with stuff like Totoro and Evangelion, and the modern era of GitS2 and TVtokyo fodder like Bleach and Naruto.

They had animator's desks set up, so you could see what they looked like. I think those were real proofs on the desks, too. They had a room full of posters, and computers set up with a guide to putting together your own Astro Boy. They had an anime library with a bunch of DVD players set up, so people could come in and watch stuff communally. They had a big screening room, but it wasn't being used when we were there. They had a an old multi-ton cel camera, the thing looked like a freaking oil rig it was so big. They even had a little studio where you could make your own animation. You got a clipboard and paper, and you could clip the previous frame of your animation underneath so it would be consistent. I made a little 14 frame animation, but when we finally put it together, I had drawn too small on the paper for it to be very visible. Oh well.

After that, we visited a big temple across the street. It had an alter kind of place where you could put in five yen and pray for a wish. I put in 50 yen, and prayed that my money would last until I got home. I also met the guard lions (I think they were lions), あ(A) is on the left facing out, and ん (N) is on the right. Explains the kana on the gates of konoha, I'd been wondering about that for a while.

After we got home, we got to go out for sushi for dinner! It was just like one of those boat sushi restaurants in the US, only twice as big, and not full of barbaric americans trying to figure out how to eat the stuff. They had tea powder at the table, and a little spigot for hot water. They had more vegetarian stuff on the rounds then I thought they would... this eggplant wasabi stuff kinda like tomago sushi, a toasted slice of corn off the cob squirted with butter and on rice thing, and a kind of creamed corn sushi. All this plus a couple basic sushis like the cucumber stuff, something similar to the cucumber stuff that I wasn't exactly sure what it was, and the ever-yummy inari.

After we got home, we watched something on TV that involved these guys scuba diving in the Philippines. They collected some namako (sea slugs), and observed with stereotypical japanese "whooah!"s as the namako spouted holes and drained body fluids and guts like punctured water balloons. The namako then dried up and dissolved in their hands like corn starch and water. Julia would have barfed.

Nighty night.

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