I am writing this in Japan. It has been one of my long-term goals to get to Japan. It has, in fact, been a dream since childhood. It hasn’t been an obsession but it has been a major facet of my life. I have made friends from Japan and learned some of the language. So much of my everyday life has centred around Japanese media. I just naturally gravitate towards things like anime and video games, music, and films and that has matured into high culture and a vague goal of becoming a part of Japanese society in some way. I have been doing that from Britain with the nebulous plan of getting to Japan. Now I am finally living in Japan. Following dreams really does work!
2015 has been marked by more of the same as I wrote about and attended films and film festivals. I got work from magazines and other websites. I practiced Japanese. Business as usual. However there are some changes in terms of my future. I have the chance to go to Japan and that has been a goal I have had for a laughably long time but I have been too cowardly to pursue it until now but before that…
The summer is here and I’m feeling a little drained of energy. I’m trying to remember how I coped with all of these previews last year… Wow, this time last year there was that awesome weekend with great films. This weekend? Not so much greatness at first glance apart from the Lupin the III.
It was a movie-rich week because I watched the J-horrors Fuan no Tane, POV: A Cursed Movie and the UK vampire flick Byzantium. I also watched Oculus which was a fun horror movie starring Karen Gillan who I almost met at the Doctor Who premiere four years ago. Expect reviews for the Japanese films.
As far as the blog goes, I reviewed Be My Baby and Museum Hours. Apologies for the brevity of the trailer posts (although I bet some are breathing a sigh of relief).
This is the second trailer post of the week following on from yesterday’s. Christmas days is less than a week away and I’m getting excited over the event and, as mentioned yesterday, a week off to watch anime and films. One of the things I intend to watch is Moteki. It’s a recommendation from my friend Tired Paul since it’s the prequel to the movie Love Strikes!, which will be one of the films that I’ll see in the Japan Foundation’s Touring Film Programme 2014. It’s a prequel and having that knowledge will be good. I’ve been trying to keep up with my Christmas posts by ploughing through a lot of horror film reviews and part of that effort was the review for the mumblegore title You’re Next! At the end of the month, Third Window Films will release the Shinya Tsukamoto film Bullet Ballet.
Enough about me, here are the rest of the films released in Japan this weekend:
Starring: Junichi Okada, Mao Inoue, Haruma Miura, Yuichiro Hirose, Nanaka Yagi, Hirofumi Arai, Min Tanaka, Kazue Fukiishi, Jun Fubuki, Isao Natsuyagi
A young man named Kentaro Saeki (Miura) has failed his bar test yet again. Confused about life he begins to research his family with his older sister Keiko (Fukiishi). They focus on their grandfather Kyuzo Miyabe (Okada) who fought in the Pacific War. He was a man scared of death and obsessed with life who volunteered to join a ‘special forces’ squad but as they encounter old colleagues of his they find a dark secret kept hidden for 60 years…
Today is National Foundation Day in Japan. The creation of the day uses elements that stem all the way back to Japan’s earliest history but the exact day, the eleventh of February, was decided during the Meiji period (1868-1912)
It has been a while since I posted anything about learning Japanese so I’m back with a short and rather silly post about Kanji and how to recognise the easy ones and some of my favourites.
Through some examples I have raided from recent anime and Japanese news programmes I watched I want to show Kanji characters that anybody can quickly recognise.
We have previously learnt about hiragana and katakana (collectively known as kana) but now we have the much more complex Kanji – the one Japanese alphabet that is scary – and I try to introduce just what it is and how to read it (thereby exposing the depths of my ignorance). That said, despite my fearful words and negativity, Kanji was what I did well at during my last exam so if a dunce like me can learn it you can to!
Brace up for what might become boredom or enlightenment (depending upon how literate I feel).
So What is Kanji?
Quick history lesson. The origins of Kanji go back to the Chinese scribes of the Yin Dynasty, which lasted from 1700 to 1050 BC.
