What’s different about the new version of Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun? First, instead of stopping at the 1,006 Kyouiku kanji, it includes the full 1,945 Jouyou set.

Next, the core writing module is considerably better. One frustration with the first edition was that it only taught shape and stroke order; if you didn’t remember what the character meant or sounded like, you had to look it up somewhere else. The new version doesn’t have the search capabilities of a real kanji dictionary, but does have readings, meanings, and vocabulary words. It also adds detailed critiques of your characters, graphically showing your errors.

They’ve also completely redone the drill and test modules, for the needs of a more sophisticated audience. This is the only place where it’s not as useful for a foreign student, because the previous edition broke up the jukugo drills by grade, and this one lumps all of the grade-school kanji into one set. The Kanji Kentei prep section is now more of a timed test than a drill, although it’s still divided by grade.

I’m currently ripping through the kyouiku kanji in the new one, so I can start on the junior-high section, but I’m going to continue working through the drills on the old one.

There are some nice restaurants in the Kintetsu mall near Kyoto Station. While perusing the menu outside of one of them, the muzak system turned up a familiar-sounding tune. I just couldn’t place it. Dave didn’t recognize it at all, and then it hit the refrain, and was revealed to be this.

The next time we went by that place, they’d cranked the silliness higher, with a muzak version of this.

There’s a perfectly good reason why the Japanese cowboy is para-para dancing. If you were hanging out with these Shibuya gals, wouldn’t you?

Culled from the blur of the last two weeks. Likely to be updated with pictures and additional commentary.

• The reason there are frequent TV ads for Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun is because there's a new release that includes all 1945 Jouyou kanji, including readings and meanings. Buy it if you have any interest in learning to read and write Japanese.
• There's surprisingly little anime on television.
• Hotels don't get the interesting TV channels.
• Except for porn, with free previews. The first thing we saw on TV was a large-breasted woman squirting milk.
• Much later, we found an iron-chef-style show best described as "real chefs with goofy assistants inventing novel dishes".
• 1-yen coins are indeed the correct tool for opening the battery compartment in older Japanese cameras.
• Hello Kitty is everywhere. Everywhere.
• So are schoolgirls in short skirts. Every day of the week. Mostly cute as buttons. Their legs looked cold.
• Hello!Project isn't quite everywhere, but random channel-surfing turned up Tsunku (hosting a catty-woman game show?), Tsuji (new mother announcement), Gal Sone (out-eating a sumo family), and a few others. And the abruptly-retired Maki Goto is still quite visible on a large Guess ad at the airport.
• The downside of putting a lot of effort into learning to speak Japanese quickly and smoothly is that people respond at full speed. I really need a private conversation tutor.
• Needing to use your Japanese dramatically improves your memory.
• Haibane Renmei saved my friend from an allergic reaction.
• When entering a comic book shop, the prominent sign reading "BL" means "wrong store".
• Any knowledge of Japanese helps. Being able to read hiragana and katakana helps a lot. Any ability with kanji is icing on the cake.
• The easiest-to-understand person that I conversed with in Japanese was a little old lady in a Kyoto incense shop.
• Strict censorship laws did not prevent me from finding an explicit hardcore Hanaukyou Maid Tai doujin collection. At a major retailer in Akihabara. Accidentally. Which had futanari Catholic school girls as the backup story.
• Beautiful young women in kimonos are not everywhere. Except in Kyoto on weekends.
• Opening a metal bottle of Pepsi Nex does not in fact summon a maiko, despite early evidence to the contrary. It only works when you're using the vending machine outside of the Gion post office.
• People in Kyoto are, on the whole, friendlier than those in Tokyo.
• Shibuya may be home to Japan's fashion victims, but the extensive public transportation network makes them visible everywhere.
• A Suica or Pasmo card is the single most useful thing to have if you're going to be in Tokyo for a few days.
• Shinagawa has little to offer except the easy ability to go elsewhere. [update: that is, the area around Shinagawa Station, which isn't really in Shinagawa-ku]
• Tonki really does have great tonkatsu. And you want to get there when they open at 4pm.
• Junsei has excellent kaiseki.
• JALPAK does great work for a great price.
• Habits acquired in a country where coins are chump change result in overstuffed pockets in a country with $5 coins.
• The morning JAL flight from Osaka to Narita leaves you with an eight-hour layover before your flight home to San Francisco. This time is best spent around Narita-san, particularly Shinshou-ji.
• On the way there, you'll pass a small restaurant that serves fresh unagi, grilled over a wood fire. That's fresh as in "they were still swimming a few minutes ago".
• I should have bought a second bag of Maiko-san no Ochobo-guchi. Now I'm going to have to hope they're available somewhere in San Jose or San Francisco.
• In addition to the popular maid cafes, Akihabara now has both nun cafes and little-sister cafes. [Update: Nun cafe, Little-sister cafe]
• There's a lot of used porn on the market. Used. Porn.
• Aya Matsuura's first DVD single collection does not include the most entertaining of her early videos, Momoiro no Kataomoi, so I didn't buy it. [Update: Ah, there's a different DVD that does include the song.]
• The Hozugawa river trip is worth it. Sadly, I couldn't keep up with the guide's rapid-fire running commentary, but he was apparently hilarious. I did at least catch the joke about the 7-11 main office.
• 富士山が見えたんです。

As we were discussing preparations for our upcoming trip to Japan, friend Dave remarked, “of course, you’ll have to teach me a few things to say in Japanese”. He is a long-time anime fan, so he’s got some basics, but just in case, I’ve prepared a refresher course. Evil laugh.

[downsampled quite a bit and converted to mono, to compensate slightly for the fact that it’s copyrighted music. Artist: Minimoni]

So I bought the second-generation Sony Reader. Thinner, faster, crisper screen, cleaned-up UI, USB2 mass storage for easy import, and some other improvements over the previous one. It still has serious limitations, and in a year or two it will be outclassed at half the price, but I actually have a real use for a book-sized e-ink reader right now: I’m finally going to Japan, and we’ll be playing tourist.

My plan is to dump any and all interesting information onto the Reader, and not have to keep track of travel books, maps, etc. It has native support for TXT, PDF, PNG, and JPG, and there are free tools for converting and resizing many other formats.

Letter and A4-sized PDFs are generally hard to read, but I have lots of experience creating my own custom-sized stuff with PDF::API2::Lite, so that’s no trouble at all. The PDF viewer has no zoom, but the picture viewer does, so I’ll be dusting off my GhostScript-based pdf2png script for maps and other one-page documents that need to be zoomed.

I’ll write up a detailed review soon, but so far there’s only one real annoyance: very limited kanji support. None at all in the book menus, which didn’t surprise me, and silent failure in the PDF viewer, which did. Basically, any embedded font in a PDF file is limited to 512 characters; if it has more, characters in that font simply won’t appear in the document at all.

The English Wikipedia and similar sites tend to work fine, because a single document will only have a few words in Japanese. That’s fine for the trip, but now that I’ve got the thing, I want to put some reference material on it. I have a script that pulls data from EDICT and KANJIDIC and generates a PDF kanji dictionary with useful vocabulary, but I can’t use it on the Reader.

…unless I embed multiple copies of the same font, and keep track of how many characters I’ve used from each one. This turns out to be trivial with PDF::API2::Lite, but it does significantly increase the size of the output file, and I can’t clean it up in Acrobat Distiller, because that application correctly collapses the duplicates down to one embedded font.

I haven’t checked to see if the native Librie format handles font-embedding properly. I’ll have to install the free Windows software at some point and give it a try.

[Update: I couldn’t persuade Distiller to leave the multiple copies of the font alone, because OpenType CID fonts apparently embed a unique ID in several places. FontForge was perfectly happy to convert it to a non-CID TrueType font, and then I only had to rename one string to create distinct fonts for embedding. My test PDF works fine on the Reader now.]

So it turns out that the reason the Choco Party girl is making the hand gestures is that she’s playing janken:

choco = choki = scissors,
party = paa = paper,
goodgood = guu = rock.

(what, you somehow missed the video? NSFW, unless you stress-test lingerie for a living)

[Update: the title says it all, really]

I’ve been getting a little Youtube-happy around here recently, which slows down page-loading, but I can’t resist the megadol: