Anime Vacation Spots
Posted: August 11, 2011 Filed under: "Editorials", Misaki Thursday 10 Comments »By the time you read this, I will no longer be here.
In a week and a half from now (from when I am writing this), I will be in Hawaii, and I have just left yesterday (according to when this has been published).
To commemorate my nearly-week-long vacation, I’ll be talking about vacation spots in anime. Nothing specific, mind you. I don’t have the memory banks to store any specifics. My brain is an old model, and it has a RAM of 128 megabytes. I don’t want to save something so useless as anime vacation spots to my hard drive. I should carry around an external brain. I hear they make them with dozens of gigabytes now.
Rich Classmate’s Summer Home
There are some things I never understand about anime/Japanese culture. One is why everybody has a hometown out in the boonies. Another is why 4-girl 4-komas always have one filthy rich girl with a vacation home out near an isolated beach.
Back in 2000, it was pretty terrible. Azumanga Daioh managed to save itself by having Osaka’s knife scene. But now every mangaka and his/her uncle and that uncle’s dog and the fleas on that dog and the bacteria on those fleas and the electrons rotating around the nuclei of those atoms that make up the bacteria feel the need to put in a vacation home chapter. And now there’s no more Osaka. There isn’t even Chiyo-chan. There’s just some stupid rich girl whose only defining characteristic is how rich and ojou-sama-like she is.
In comparison, my defining characteristic would be how middle-class and college-student-otaku-like I am. Does that smell like UNIQUE to you? No, it doesn’t! If anything, it smells like too much homework on the weekdays, cup ramen at random times during the day, and lots of Minecraft and TF2 in the evening.
Heck, at least Chiyo was small and ten years old and small! Mugi needs big eyebrows to become a quarter-fledged character and Tsuruya needs a fang and really damn long green hair! Come on, those aren’t REAL character traits. A simple haircut or a shave could trim all the excess hair away, and these two would be left with nothing but their richness and their money.
But then again, I wouldn’t mind being left with oodles of cash.
Remote Island Syndrome
Sometimes the rich girl has an island, too. Or maybe the rich girl’s best friend’s fellow club member is in an organization that owns an island. Or maybe a certain class rep is rich enough to rent out an island for the entire class.
In any case, anime summers often end up on a private island in the middle of nowhere… perfect for a murder!
But if you stop and think about it for a second, wouldn’t somebody have some excessive stupidity if they wanted to murder people in a closed circle environment? If said murderer kills only one person, then you have a full list of suspects: the people on the island! Just send ’em all to the interrogation room.
Do closed circle cases even happen in real life? You see it all the time on television because it’s a convenient way to make everything and everyone ambiguous, but you rarely hear about it on the news.
I don’t have anything left to say about this. I probably had something lined up in my head and dressed up in mayonnaise, mustard, and jalapeno peppers when I wrote “closed circle island” as a bullet point a couple of days ago. But now the mayonnaise is sour, the mustard is sourer, and the jalapeno peppers are as prinstinely spicy as ever. Everybody knows that peppers take ages to go bad.
So I’m 1 for 3 here, and I give this section of the post a corresponding 33% approval rating. If I saw this kind of rating on metacritic, I’d think Big Rigs or Elf Bowling-quality. But this part wasn’t that bad, right? At least I didn’t drive off the map into funky gray zone or rotate backwards at a million mph.
City Pool
On an unrelated note, the first recognizable character (民) on the pool sign above is “mín” in Chinese. Despite going to Chinese school for eight years, I have a very limited and basic understanding of Chinese. Thus the only phrase I can relate this character to is “mín zú” (民族), which roughly means “nationality.”
According to Google Translate, the single character means “people” or “nationality” by itself. So what’s the extra “zú” character supposed to do? It means the same thing with or without the second character so why do people need to add the second one?
Generic Festival matsuri whatever
I was in Little Tokyo the other day and happened to come across an Obon Festival taking place at one of the temples. For a tenth of a millisecond, I gave in to the weeaboo side and thought that there would be goldfish scooping and mask vendors. But then I wised up. This was America!
And more importantly, the dango my friend bought looked like this.
Yes, I took the picture of the “dango” and the picture of the festival above with the same shitty camera built into my phone. But for some reason, the dango picture looks amazing while the one above is terrible. I should have brought my digital camera that day.
But anyway, the Little Tokyo festival was very strange. We walked past a bake sale, went into the basement of the temple where lots of daycare kids were listening to a guy making a speech, and came out the other side to see a mob of middle-aged Asian women buying various fruits and veggies that were all really damn cheap. I’m not too knowledgeable about Japanese culture, so I’m guessing this is the norm.
Shooting galleries and yo-yo fishing are just stuff of fiction. Reality is filled with cheap groceries and middle-aged Asian men who sound like twenty-year-old black women singing English songs on stage.
I also saw this car parked a few cars down from mine. One out of the ten people who will click on that link probably recognizes this as the car at the Dannychoo booth at AX. According to my friend, Dannychoo itasha’d some con-goer’s car for free (in exchange for blatant advertising for some shitty blog).
If I were him, I would draw two big Xes over Mirai’s eyes. Screw Dannychoo’s stupid advertising. I would also write out “Misaki Thursday” over the “Mirai Suenaga” bit. Or I could write “Mikoto Misaka” and change the stupid moe looking stupid Mirai into Mikoto Misaka.
I didn’t even bother talking about anime in this section, huh?
I got a haircut today
Whenever I get a haircut and the barber/barberress/conan the barbarian can speak English, he/she asks me, “how do you style your hair?”
Why do people assume I style my hair? I mean, I came in with my hair drooping down and clearly unstyled so why do you think I keep buckets of gel at home? I use shampoo and conditioner and soap and that’s it!
One of these days, I’m just going to reply “I leave it to fate” or “I use my pillow” or “what’s hair?” I’m sure they’ll appreciate my thoughtful response.
In a desperate attempt to relate this to anime: the only two anime I’ve watched that show a character actually getting a haircut are Full Metal Panic and Gintama, though the latter involves the Shogun, poop, and pubic hair. Anime characters don’t usually get haircuts, come to think of it. Even in slice-of-life shows.
Well, I’m sure it’d be hard to cut hair that can stand up like this. You’d need a diamond chainsaw. I wonder how much that would cost.
It’d be pretty costly to make in Minecraft, but not as much as a diamond chestplate or something. Those things are really damn expensive.
Speaking of Minecraft, I quit the game. It’s too addictive and sucked out almost five hours of my day, everyday. And that was when I was in school, too!
But at least it’s not as bad as WoW. I remember sitting in front of the Dalaran fountain for an entire day, just fishing up coins. Even though I managed to get all the bronze, silver, and gold coins, I don’t think I ever got the fishing title because the stupid fish in Orgrimmar was so hard to catch. I fished in the troll lake next to the first aid guy for hours, and I saw so many people catch it. But I only ever got the useless fish and a couple of vials.
Who needs vials anyway?
You’re a loser, who goes to Hawaii anyways.
I thought you said the pool said pu-lu-lu, which would be like tu-tu-ru but trolololololol because prololololololol sounds more like prololteriat or whatever they’re called.
Man, you know less Chinese than I do, and I’ve went to… one… two… SIX years of chinese school! *pulls out trusty chinese-english dick* min on it self could mean the people of a nation, but when you add zu, then you know that it refers to a specific group of people – it doesn’t have to be divided by nation, it could be divided by language etc. and I don’t really actually know what I’m talking about because my chinese-english dick is in chinese.
That said, I don’t actually have a chinese-english dick, because face it, which chinese person would shack up with an englander? I mean, they came and stole all our tea and then waged bloody war while selling us opium and shit. And now look who’s complaining about their rating being downgraded to AA. Serves you right. If you didn’t rebel against England China wouldn’t even loan money to you because of the wars, even though China probably actually really does loan money to England even now, but because you split off so Canada won the motherfucking war of 1812, bitches.
Fuck, stop eating sushi, especially when it’s wrapped with weed. Those festivals aren’t even IN Japan, if they were, Danny Choo would be Danny Phantom and suddenly I don’t even what anymore
Also, all I use to wash my hair is water and soap. I DON’T EVEN KNOW/CARE WHAT TYPE OF SOAP I’M USING
Tu-tu-ru~
Also, have fun in Hawaii. Currently thinking of:
– Cosplay that wouldn’t totally humiliate me when posted on a social network
– Cosplay that is completely crazy since half of me doesn’t give a
@Mushyrulez:
PU-RO-UU
Two people go have sex in a bush and get brainwashed and become model citizens. But the proles – they roam free, and no man can take their spirit away! Sooner or later, they will rise up and rebel and Big Daddies and Big Sisters and whatever is going to be in Infinite will be no more!
I HATE SUSHI AND SASHIMI AND WHATEVER JAPANESE PEOPLE EAT RAW
Besides, fish are not meant to be eaten anyway. They’re just supposed to swim around in tanks and look cool. We all evolved from fish so we should respect them instead of eating them. They taste like crap.
@Seinime:
It’s really hard to get that balance right! Canon donmai, though – I see pictures of his Manma all over the internet. I’m hoping that whatever I do for AX next year will not go on facebook and prevent people from hiring me. Or I could delete my facebook. Yeah.
But that one guy /died/.
Is that being a model citizen?
Then again he could be shaped into modelling clay and then I guess he’d be a model citizen.
Wait, he died?
I read some chapters of that (especially the… the… S-SEX ONE!), but I sparknoted the rest so I don’t know anything.
It’s implyed that he died.
OR HE REACHED ENLIGHTENMENT
GET IT?!
IN LIGHT
A MENT
Son, your Chinese make me disappoint. You and your Japan cartoon bring shame to ancestors.
*cools self with fan*
*takes sip of tea*
Okay, so my Chinese is really bad. It stems from early in my childhood, when I doodled in Chinese school instead of actually learning Chinese. And in the breaks between class, I went around looking for money under vending machines.
I may not have Chinese literacy, but I have the TRUE CHINESE SPIRIT!
How Everybody look at it can be comparable to what you could have said, but you’ve got noted some points that i would have forgotten. I appreciate you for taking the time to put together article. I am going to share this with a couple of of my buddies.