Abacuses, how do they work? :V
... excuse me for channeling that meme.
Anyway Dad came home today and brought me... well, a number of souvenirs.
1) an abacus (he was serious when he said he wanted me to learn to use one orz) and an instruction book, which has already lost me despite being in hiragana only (would it kill them to tell me what the units are and what exactly is "0"? :V
2) Blazblue Phase 0, which is awesome despite having lost me with copious amounts of kanji orz
3) What appears to be a multipack of Pretz in red bean paste flavor
4) a fan and a souvenir guide pamphlet from Yasukuni Shrine, place of some infamy (outside Japan anyway) due to some of the people interred there (Dad's a bit touchy about the use of the term "war criminal")
I... kind of feel a little spoiled getting all this but Phase 0 I am going to read even if I have to check every damn kanji that pops up in a dictionary so I know what on earth is going on. D8
Also I kind of... really like the size, weight, and consistency of Japanese paperbacks and their pages. They're considerably more compact than typical American paperbacks and I guess there's a lot of reasons behind the size of American paperbacks vs Japanese ones. You can fit a lot more in a 4.5" x 6" page in Japanese than you can in English. Granted Phase 0 is a light novel and so it's got a little bit less in content, perhaps, to digest than the traditional novel.
Maybe it's just an odd thing I picked up after years of following my dad about at the used bookstore while he scoured the shelves for missing volumes in any of the series he was reading at the time and filling up a basket with $1 novels, all printed in Japanese with their dust covers relatively intact. I would go upstairs when my parents still lived together and the master bedroom smelled a little bit like a library. Kind of musty. Books shelved by the dozens. I don't know how many my father has bought but I reckon his collection of novels has to be at least three or four hundred volumes. One fantasy series alone spanned over a hundred. He reads voraciously in Japanese.
It makes me a little sad that because of my reading level in Japanese all those books were around and yet I'll probably not be able to read and understand any of them until... well, I'll have to study like hell before I'd get any of them, I suppose. There's something about reading texts from other cultures (which Japan basically is to me, since I was born and raised in America) in that the cultural references tend to get lost across the divide and that wordplay is considerably harder across languages. People attempt to pick it up through translation, but it's hard to properly transfer all of the nuances of a given text when it's not in its original wording in its original language. It's funny, though. I guess in a limited way translation does do its job. I haven't read much by Japanese writers but I notice that the translations often have a certain... well, I'm not entirely sure. It's not a tangible quality by any means and it is often something left up to interpretation, but for me the few I've read shared a certain... shall we say, very Zen quality to their prose. Maybe not Zen. It's not empty and it isn't necessarily enlightened. It's just... like it's there and engaged, but also in a way curiously detached. Maybe a little bit of Inscrutable Oriental written in there or something. It describes nothing when I call it "very Japanese" considering that I often have little idea of what that entails. My only claim to "quintessentially Japanese," after all, is my blood. And the little Japanese that I speak poorly.
Sometimes I wonder how I would've turned out had I been born in Japan to a different set of parents. I guess I would have a livedoor account instead of a livejournal, though. I'd probably fangirl seiyuus and actors and stalk their journals and chatter on Pixiv and watch dramas. Walk to school. Be expected to go the traditional 4 year college route. Maybe be somewhat trimmer due to walking everywhere. Have an obsession with phone charms and Harajuku acrylic nails.
I would probably have never met any of you guys, though. Truthfully I'm not really comfortable anywhere. I grew up here in America but sometimes I feel like a foreigner. I haven't spent nearly enough time in Japan to qualify the country as anywhere I've "lived" and there I often feel like a foreigner. It's a little like straddling a line, but not properly balanced. It's not a line I can really fall off of but at the same time I feel out of place a lot.
So I suppose that relatively clichéd phrase "home is where the heart is" actually does apply for me. When I'm with good friends, goofing off or playing games or doing a back-and-forth comic page or... whatever it is? It's like I've come home or something. These days it's not as strong, but sometimes I feel as though I would be content to stay forever. (Of course, realistically speaking that'd be impossible. I'd drive them all crazy and then where would I be?)
also have some random Pokemon
Anyway Dad came home today and brought me... well, a number of souvenirs.
1) an abacus (he was serious when he said he wanted me to learn to use one orz) and an instruction book, which has already lost me despite being in hiragana only (would it kill them to tell me what the units are and what exactly is "0"? :V
2) Blazblue Phase 0, which is awesome despite having lost me with copious amounts of kanji orz
3) What appears to be a multipack of Pretz in red bean paste flavor
4) a fan and a souvenir guide pamphlet from Yasukuni Shrine, place of some infamy (outside Japan anyway) due to some of the people interred there (Dad's a bit touchy about the use of the term "war criminal")
I... kind of feel a little spoiled getting all this but Phase 0 I am going to read even if I have to check every damn kanji that pops up in a dictionary so I know what on earth is going on. D8
Also I kind of... really like the size, weight, and consistency of Japanese paperbacks and their pages. They're considerably more compact than typical American paperbacks and I guess there's a lot of reasons behind the size of American paperbacks vs Japanese ones. You can fit a lot more in a 4.5" x 6" page in Japanese than you can in English. Granted Phase 0 is a light novel and so it's got a little bit less in content, perhaps, to digest than the traditional novel.
Maybe it's just an odd thing I picked up after years of following my dad about at the used bookstore while he scoured the shelves for missing volumes in any of the series he was reading at the time and filling up a basket with $1 novels, all printed in Japanese with their dust covers relatively intact. I would go upstairs when my parents still lived together and the master bedroom smelled a little bit like a library. Kind of musty. Books shelved by the dozens. I don't know how many my father has bought but I reckon his collection of novels has to be at least three or four hundred volumes. One fantasy series alone spanned over a hundred. He reads voraciously in Japanese.
It makes me a little sad that because of my reading level in Japanese all those books were around and yet I'll probably not be able to read and understand any of them until... well, I'll have to study like hell before I'd get any of them, I suppose. There's something about reading texts from other cultures (which Japan basically is to me, since I was born and raised in America) in that the cultural references tend to get lost across the divide and that wordplay is considerably harder across languages. People attempt to pick it up through translation, but it's hard to properly transfer all of the nuances of a given text when it's not in its original wording in its original language. It's funny, though. I guess in a limited way translation does do its job. I haven't read much by Japanese writers but I notice that the translations often have a certain... well, I'm not entirely sure. It's not a tangible quality by any means and it is often something left up to interpretation, but for me the few I've read shared a certain... shall we say, very Zen quality to their prose. Maybe not Zen. It's not empty and it isn't necessarily enlightened. It's just... like it's there and engaged, but also in a way curiously detached. Maybe a little bit of Inscrutable Oriental written in there or something. It describes nothing when I call it "very Japanese" considering that I often have little idea of what that entails. My only claim to "quintessentially Japanese," after all, is my blood. And the little Japanese that I speak poorly.
Sometimes I wonder how I would've turned out had I been born in Japan to a different set of parents. I guess I would have a livedoor account instead of a livejournal, though. I'd probably fangirl seiyuus and actors and stalk their journals and chatter on Pixiv and watch dramas. Walk to school. Be expected to go the traditional 4 year college route. Maybe be somewhat trimmer due to walking everywhere. Have an obsession with phone charms and Harajuku acrylic nails.
I would probably have never met any of you guys, though. Truthfully I'm not really comfortable anywhere. I grew up here in America but sometimes I feel like a foreigner. I haven't spent nearly enough time in Japan to qualify the country as anywhere I've "lived" and there I often feel like a foreigner. It's a little like straddling a line, but not properly balanced. It's not a line I can really fall off of but at the same time I feel out of place a lot.
So I suppose that relatively clichéd phrase "home is where the heart is" actually does apply for me. When I'm with good friends, goofing off or playing games or doing a back-and-forth comic page or... whatever it is? It's like I've come home or something. These days it's not as strong, but sometimes I feel as though I would be content to stay forever. (Of course, realistically speaking that'd be impossible. I'd drive them all crazy and then where would I be?)
also have some random Pokemon