Truth in captioning.

Amazon Japan has a very different image of me as a customer. While I’ve overtrained Amazon US to the point that it uses the most tenuous and obscure connections to come up with recommendations, the Japanese site has no such difficulty. I get the occasional curveball after I’ve used it as a search engine for obscure words, but for the most part, recommendations are plausibly based on things I’ve actually bought.

In this case, because I once tossed a few random light novels (mostly still-unread) into an order, including one called School Succubus Panic (in which the titular succubi are available in maid, catgirl, vampire, meganekko teacher, and other flavors; why, yes, it is porn), Amazon Japan just sent me a recommendation for Imouto no Rippubaajin wa Onii-chan no Mono. I had to click through just to see if I’d parsed it correctly…

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It’s hard to look forward to a relaxing vacation when the airline keeps silently canceling your outgoing flight. This is the second time my sister has checked her upcoming itineraries and discovered that our flight from San Franciso to Osaka was missing. No notification email, no refund, no hint on the site that we ever booked such a flight, and not much concern from the folks who answer the phones. If the higher-level support rep doesn’t sweeten the deal for us after the second screw, I will be “less than polite” about it.

Our new flight connects through Tokyo, adding three hours to the day. The good news is that a flight to Tokyo is less likely to be canceled, and the domestic leg is JAL.

Grumble. Clearly I should stop using the Brickmuppet Travel Agency, before we get to Kyoto and find our hotel burned down.

On the whole, I’m glad that I hooked back up with Disk Network and subscribed to TV Japan, but only because my box has DVR functionality. If I were limited to what’s on when I’m home, it wouldn’t be worth the $25/month.

My goal was to listen to a lot more Japanese, and more importantly, to unexpected Japanese, delivered in a variety of ways. Because I’m incapable of ignoring human voices (which really sucks when you work in a cubicle…), I expected the constant exposure to tug at my brain a little, as I tried to understand it, and that’s what I’m getting.

In particular, because I’m generally not actively watching, I can’t anticipate the general category of phrases I’m going to hear. Maybe it’s a period drama with formal speech, maybe it’s a surly teenager griping, maybe it’s a detective grilling a suspect, etc. This has done a lot to break me of the habit of trying to analyze or translate sentences; either I understand it or I don’t. If I got it, I don’t have time to set up for the possible responses; all I can do is keep going until I end up baffled. This is the same approach that gets me through light novels, where if I stop too long to reason something out, I’m no longer reading. I’ve built myself a much stronger support system for the novels, but then, it’s simply harder to read the languange than it is to listen to it.

Things I skip:

• children's shows
• anything with English, especially Japanese dubbed over still-audible English
• any show where they frequently talk over music that has vocals (travel, soft news, talk shows, etc)
• health, beauty, and exercise shows; they can be fun to look at, but the speech is deadly dull
• large chunks of shows like Music Station; too much rap and hip-hop influence
• most non-pop music shows, especially amateur singing
• anime; they simply don't run anything interesting
• angsty teen school drama
• stand-up comedy

Now that the TV is capable of something more than movies and games, I’ve been leaving TV Japan on in the background to improve my ear. This works well enough that I occasionally have the urge to walk into the family room to see the images associated with something I think I just understood (such as the interview with Donald Richie, the continuing news about Fukushima, or the gradually-lengthening promos for Deka Wanko).

[Best so far was hearing a young woman walk in and tell her mother she had something serious to discuss, and then saying “I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me”; I understood the whole scene, and followed along fairly well when the mother tracked down the offending boyfriend and he confessed that while he loved her, he was an orphan with no family to offer her. Mom said, “just like me”]

But sometimes it’s just goofy. The kid’s shows are painful, most of the daytime stuff is aimed at housewives, and I swear that almost all female announcers and narrators drink the same kool-aid that powers Nina on The Good Night Show.

And then, Sunday afternoon, I heard a hoarse, heavily-accented voice shout, in English:

"I.... Can.... Speak.... Dutch!"

Unpleasant surprise with a happy ending: yesterday morning, Interplanet Janet was looking at her upcoming flight itineraries, and discovered that our November round-trip flight to Kyoto had somehow become a one-way trip from Japan back to San Francisco.

There were vestigial traces of the actual to-Japan departure date associated with the itinerary, but no flight, and no hints on the site or email notifications. You couldn’t even tell when it had happened. To make sure it wasn’t just her account being messed up, I logged into mine and double-checked. Same thing.

On the phone, they told her that they’d canceled the flight for that day, but they could put us on the previous day’s flight instead, and also adjust her connecting flight from Chicago at no charge.

So, while I’m disturbed that this happened silently and could have horribly screwed up our trip if she hadn’t noticed it, we end up with an extra day in Japan, which doesn’t suck. I couldn’t change the existing hotel reservation, so I booked us for one night right by the airport. We can get our bags shipped from there to the Kyoto hotel, leaving us free to spend the day in Osaka.

Additional bonus: no lengthy train ride after the long flight. If things go smoothly, we can be relaxing in the hotel less than an hour after the plane touches down, with time to unwind before hunting dinner.

The one thing I need to research is what we want to do on our extra day, because it happens to be a national holiday, Labor Thanksgiving Day. My impression is that stores, restaurants, and tourist sites are going to be open but packed. I don’t know if stores that are usually closed on Wednesdays (like much of DenDen Town) will be open, but it’s probably not a good day to try for Osaka Castle or the Duck Tour. Maybe just a day of souvenir-hunting in Namba, Dotombori, and DenDen Town?

Ignore the wretched cover design, with its physically painful use of letterspaced Lithos Bold. Readers Guide to Intermediate Japanese is not the cheesy self-published unedited piece of crap it appears to be. (honestly, if it hadn’t been from University of Hawai’i Press, I wouldn’t have bought it on a bet)

This is an excellent reference to written Japanese, filled with clear explanations of the things you start running into when you step outside of prepared student texts. It neatly supplements the three volumes of Makino/Tsutsui’s grammar, filling in some important gaps. It also provides some useful cross-references to similar phrases and standard forms, for the student who isn’t sure if he should be looking up chigai nai or ni chigai nai, etc.

Perhaps most immediately useful is the 19-page section listing common variations of ki ga/ni/o X and 9 pages of mi ga/ni/o X. You pick up some of this in textbooks, but it’s very nice to have it all in one place.

Sadly, as usual there is no ebook edition. Someday, you’ll be able to carry around thirty pounds of reference books on an 8-ounce reader, but not today.

This morning, I stumbled across one of the small things I bought in Japan, a souvenir keychain from Toudaiji.

Turns out this little fellow has a secret.

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