So to start off, I just want to say one thing.

I hope Aya Hirano stops being a seiyuu, if it means she loses her crazy fans. Especially if she loses her crazy fans. (link goes to Sankaku Complex, NSFW as hell, naturally)

So Sankaku Complex has reported that Aya Hirano’s fanbase (or at least the ones on 2ch who, frankly, I don’t believe represent the majority of her fans, just as I don’t believe 2ch itself represents the Japanese public) has pitched a shitfit over her recent television appearance, where she had talked candidly about her sex life. Apparently, those who have seen their Aya-chan turn out to have become a brazen harlot have become upset that she can’t live up to whatever lofty status they have in their mind. Thanks, virgin-whore complex! You’ve really enriched our lives, haven’t you?!

I cut a lot of slack on Japanese anime fans than most people, because I believe that most of the time when it comes to Japanese fandom, we don’t get the full picture. But these people smashing music CDs and cutting pictures of Aya Hirano’s face on them with exacto knives, vandalising her Wikipedia page,  planning to kill her… These people must be lugging around ten-pound brass balls in their jocks, because I am amazed at how nasty this whole thing has gotten. Quite literally, I am amazed. And a little bit horrified.

Those few who have commented on this (even Sankaku Complex itself, after a fashion) have most decidely spoken out against 2ch’s reaction towards Aya’s interview, and frankly, I can’t blame them. This kind of reaction is a bloody disgrace, especially to the saner Aya Hirano fans (who I imagine are hiding their faces in shame somewhere across Japan) as these crazy people take their fan entitlement and drive it screaming into a damned wall. Even the whole fan outrage over the Kannagi manga wasn’t as bad as this. The fan outrage over Endless Eight wasn’t as bad as this. At least Nagi was a fictional character, and couldn’t really be hurt; people must be fearing for Aya Hirano’s life right about now!

I really wish that maybe some cooler heads might prevail over all this, or that these crazy people, trying to get their revenge on Aya Hirano simply because she has a sex life, are in a singular minority that might be able to pose no threat. Because these people make me feel seriously skeeved out, and somewhat ashamed to say that I like Aya Hirano. And these crazy people are making other people feel ashamed as well, especially feeling ashamed of being an anime fan.

And I know that nobody wants that.

But with the anime coming out (and quickly getting cut to ribbons, leading to an uncensored webcast of episodes popping up), something hit me about the series that I figured has to make some kind of sense: Seikon no Qwaser, in it’s own shounen manga style, is trying to hit the depraved heights of your average Kazuo Koike “jigoku manga”, such as Crying Freeman (or Flying Semen, durr hurr hurr) and Mad Bull 34. These manga, beloved by TV and Otaku USA’s Partick Macias and Otaku USA writer and rape advocate Daryl “Rape-2-Live” Surat are well known for their heaping helpings of sex, violence, misogyny and downright batshit insanity, and the Koike name has become a brand, a seal of sleazy pulp quality wherever it goes.

Of course, Koike’s manga are usually seinen, while Qwaser is shounen, and Qwaser doesn’t seem to go the depths of sleaziness that a Koike work is usually capable of going… And I think that this is what might be my problem with the work: even with rampant nudity, nipple suckling and perversion, everything feels a little bit too pat. Mafuyu and Sasha’s relationship in the manga is nothing you would see in some average modern shounen manga, except a little bit pervier. Tomo just seems to be there to be useless and be kidnapped and jiggle. Nothing seems to go to the level of crazy that Koike goes to in practically every manga he writes, not even to the level even Eiichiro Oda over at Shounen Jump is capable of on an off-day!

So I stopped reading after the first volume, and haven’t picked it up since. And since I downloaded about three episodes of the anime, both in uncut and bowdlerised formats, I might watch those episodes. Maybe. But even so, I probably won’t try and follow the series to its end…

For those of you few readers or mine who have been around to know this OVA, or have at least listened to the Anime World Order episode where Daryl Surat talked at length of this legendarily warped and nihilistic anime, you know that this series would catch a lot of interest from curious viewers who’ve heard about it and want to see the badness for themselves.

So, as so much has been said about this anime, that I naturally clicked on the link for MD Geist.

I got a message saying that the video wasn’t available. What the fuck?

This sort of thing has been going on with YouTube for quite a while, and every time it happens it just pisses me right the fuck off. When I’d scour YouTube for music videos to watch and listen to (sure I can use iTunes, but that doesn’t carry the risk of the feeling of permenant grime from downloading an emo song and having it kept forever on my iPod) I’d repeatedly come across the same problem, where for no idiotic reason, you’d get search results for videos that are locked out of my country for some ridiculous reason, in this day and age. Hulu and MTVMusic also followed in their footsteps, barring those dirty filthy Albionians from their pure white American internet shores for no real reason apart from “copyright issues”, in some useless bid to fight internet piracy.

And of course, it’s also happened to me in that (possibly) formerly schiesty-ass like Ken Lay Schiesty McDermott website CrunchyRoll. A lot of shows that are available for streaming on CrunchyRoll, including Surat approved shows such as Fist of the North Star and Galaxy Express 999 are barred for UK viewers, for the same reasons (and lately Sasamekikoto has had this fate befall them as well, which must’ve put a dampener on Erica Friedman’s attempts to drum up support for it…). Why? Copyright issues! Same with the Funimation Channel, after a period of time when it actually allowed people from the UK to watch their content, it suddenly barred them as well, because oh no, copyright issues!

And, if my guess is correct, and it’s not some sort of coding fuck-up that happened to the site, the same thing has happened to YouTube. While shows like Baccano!, Shuffle!, Heroic Age and Darker Than Black are on YouTube and stream just fine, shows I’ve found on that one search through such as Casshern Sins and MD Geist appeared on Youtube only briefly for few seconds, but have now disappeared again. If Americans are watching MD Geist on YouTube right now, then I can only think that once again, the British anime fandom has been left out of the cold, thanks to those pesky copyright issues.

Why? British people speak English and could read subtitles about as well as any American could read them. And there are other countries out there (Australia, New Zealand, Ireland-that’s-not-part-of-the-UK) aside from the UK that speak English as a primary language. Why don’t we get to watch the same anime video streams that Americans enjoy? Why can’t we watch Fist of the North Star or Galaxy Express 999, instead of having to make do with Miracle Train or Koihime Musou?

Copyright issues?

What kind of unholy mess is keeping these shows from being brought to the British public at large? What kind of issues are keeping Funimation from showing this stuff, these shows that they show all American fans, to the wider English speaking public at large? Is it really just a matter that goes down to simply greed? The search for more money? Because that what it looks like to me, sitting at my computer, wondering why I can’t watch anime on the Funimation Channel.

And of course, there’s the torrenters and pirates. Video streaming is supposed to be the great weapon against these guys, the people who are stealing their revenue away: a service that allows them to watch anime for free, or for a cheap monthly fee, the latest anime as it’s being shown on television in Japan. But when they block out members of the English speaking public of the world from watching anime, and just letting Americans in to watch their product, they’re not really combating piracy; they’re just shifting the centre, towards the non-American English speakers who have been shut out due to those lousy “copyright issues”.

What YouTube, Funimation, and all other anime licensers hoping to stream anime in English for the masses better remember is that when they translate and release a series for internet streaming, especially on an international video site such as YouTube, is that the English speaking population of the world does not begin and end with the United States of America, or the United Kingdom, but in South Africa, India, The Philippines and Singapore, and other countries in the world. Then, and only then, can they really make streaming anime across the Internet profitable.

What I imagine Colony Drop writers think themselves to be.

I’ve been involved in yet another colourful argument with the Space Nazis over at Colony Drop over yet another of their nasty little poison pen posts about anime fandom and Otaku. Of course, considering the modus operandi of Colony Drop when it comes to fandom is to be the biggest wankers (in Fandom Wank terms, no less) possible, it’s no surprise they get a lot of attention.

This week, the focus of their butthurt is over Akihabara, and the seeming misrepresentation it gets from most anime fans, after having inexplicably went there after 9pm for drinks and dinner, when all the shops would be about to close…

So, Sean describes wandering Akihabara after hours, and the feeling of desolation you’d get from such a place. This I can hardly rebuke, as I’ve been in a similar situation. When I first walked into Akihabara, I inexplicably decided to get up and get to the train station at around 7am, and get to the Electric Town as soon as possible. And it didn’t take me until I actually emerged from the subway exit to find out how bad this was an idea, as…

Tora no Ana, before the Beast wakes.

…all the shops were shut. So as a result of this, I found myself wandering the length and breadth of Chuo-dori, the main drag of Akihabara Electric Town, taking pictures of closed shopfronts such as that one above, and generally looking for something to do. Chuo-dori was dead asleep, at the rare time before it would rise, bidden at the tenth hour, to feast on the currency of the hapless citizens of the country, as well as all the other countries foolhardy enough to venture near its jaws.

And ironically, on my last day in Tokyo before I left for England’s greener pastures, I would find myself roaming Akihabara at night, and witness the dread beast falling into it’s dread sleep again. Like our dear friend Sean here:

The maids who lined the streets to hand out fliers had left for home, and with them, so had the otaku, their ubiquitous, oversized backpacks stuffed with doujinshi and figurines. Fading remnants of Akihabara’s daytime activity and bustle still lingered, but they were being shuttered, closed or ignored. We were trapped in Disneyland after closing; the animatronic ghosts of otaku cool haunting the streets, lifeless and cold.

So yes, I’ve been to Akihabara, and I understand that place for what it is. As we all know, Akihabara’s reputation as the one-stop shopping district of Japanese otakudom is well known among us Western anime fans, as it should, being featured on practically any anime or manga that is about otaku or otaku pursuits. However it just isn’t enough! According to our friend Sean here, Akihabara’s reputation is being inflated and blown all out of proportion into being a haven, a Mecca for anime fans! And he’s going to tell us the truth!

Akihabara is not the epicenter of Japan’s cool otaku subculture, nor does that subculture even exist. Akihabara is an over-merchandised shopping complex in the middle of Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward, populated by Japan’s manchildren, gawking tourists and the foreign residents who erroneously portray it as the hub of modern Japanese pop-culture.

What a sad sight this is...

Alright, so I’m being a bit facetious here, but as is usual with these people over at Colony Drop, it’s hard to tell whether they’re joking or not whenever they do something like this. Usually I just assume they’re not kidding, and then when somebody calls them out on it, they tell us it’s all just a joke they’re playing on us that we just don’t get. But really, posts like this are a dime a dozen on Colony Drop, and it tends to get in the way of the posts that really should be garnering attention. But for their sake, I’ll go through their points and analyse and respond to them, like a good little Japtoon geek should…

Okay, first:

• Akihabara is being misrepresented as a centre of “ota-cool”.

Well, this is hardly a point that I can argue against. Akihabara isn’t really anything special once you peel back the gloss and maids and flashing lights. It’s nothing like any major shopping district in America or England, but it’s also nothing you can’t get the hang of once you’ve gained your bearings. It’s a place full of shops, amusement arcades, restaurants and fast food courts and maid cafes. There’s no real vibrant cultural scene you can really get your hands on in Akihabara, it’s all sell sell sell, play play play. Blame the Japanese keeping to themselves most of the time, or sticking around in packs. If you want urban culture, you’re better off in Harajuku. And that’s probably not what it’s used to be any more…

It still has a rather heady reputation as being unique as a massive shopping district that deals exclusively in geek goods, video games and anime and manga. While Nakano Broadway becomes a haven for figure hunters and super-otaku, Akihabara will always be the face of Japanese otaku culture, and there’s no getting past that.

So what about the so-called Danny Choos and Patrick W. Galbraiths of the world who, according to Sean, are perpetuating the myth of the so-called “ota-cool” culture with their blogging and coverage of otaku hotspots, such as the latest maid cafe or place to get arcade circuits?

Well, Danny Choo is mostly putting up photos of places in Tokyo he goes to, and the places he eats with his little plastic figures, or writing about various little minutiae in Japan for weeaboos to lap up. He never really came across to me personally as a prophet of the cool otaku, apart from the fact that he has a high paying job, and is a really big fan of anime and manga.

As for Patrick Galbraith, he’s more of the otacool type, but he doesn’t look like the kind of person to take seriously as “otaku cool”. Really, a lot of the foreign anime fans who are living in Japan would probably know of the real otaku culture in Japan. Otherwise, if they didn’t, would they still be staying there, running businesses in Japan?

And on that note, who can really take Danny Choo seriously as the epitome of otacoolness when he talks about the joys of dolphin waxing? Does Danny Choo even take Danny Choo seriously, when he talks about the joys of dolphin waxing?

So, moving swiftly along to our next point:

• Japanese anime otaku are shunned outcasts, even by Japanese non-otaku

This is a point that is belaboured constantly by Sean and his little friends at Colony Drop, and one that I still have trouble understanding why. Why does he seem to have to bring this point up constantly?

One certain podcast (the Anime 3000 Panel, I believe) equates the Japanese anime otaku to the American comic book fandom: very large and diverse in real life, but also frequently misrepresented. But the two most well-known publishers of comics in America, DC and Marvel, publish almost nothing but superhero comics, which mean they take up the majority of the market, with other comics of other genres, as well as the more artistic or thought-provoking comics, are sold by lower profile publishers. Hence, some people don’t like to come out as comics fans in America, as it still has a reputation of being kids’ stuff, despite certain famous comic books attempting to dispel that notion.

As for the Japanese otaku? Well, think of the old-fashioned Japanese values that many Japanese people still exhibit today, even though it hearkens back to a dark period in Japanese history, values which can be summed up in one proverb: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” The best answer that I can come up with is that, with anime studios and television networks recently focusing in on the otaku base with constant harem shows, eroge adaptations and moe four panel comics, anime is being kept from being able to appeal to other audiences.

The Colony Drop view of otaku under their most common stereotype is a constant fixture of their posts about otaku or certain recent anime, which makes me think of them as rather backwards thinking in general. Note that in the article, dear old Sean says that otaku are “viewed as creepy loners”, but doesn’t differentiate between otaku that are creepy and otaku that aren’t. Instead, he just differentiates Akihabara’s visitors as otaku, non-otaku, and tourists. This will be important as I go on to the next point:

• “Otaku culture” is actually based around nothing more than pornography and sex.

Yet another Colony Drop otaku hangup that appears repeatedly throughout their posts, and one of the big stereotypes that Colony Drop repeatedly advocates whenever it talks about Japanese otaku or the strange and often unnerving world of moé at any length.

Why? Well, with the popularity of eroge and harem anime as of recently, the rise of moé culture, not to mention Japan’s… relaxed stance towards sexual content in media despite it’s buttoned down nature in general (apart from it’s bizarre censorship laws regarding genitalia, but that’s a rant for a different night), it’s hard not to see that a lot of Akihabara’s entertainment has a sexual frisson around it. You don’t go to a maid cafe for the food, you go for the feeling of being served by a pretty girl. You can see eroge for sale in places like AsoBit City and Gamers, and I found a couple of those soft breasted mouse pads. I went to a maid cafe, just because they seemed so popular in Akihabara. I noticed that there were even, horrors of horrors, actual females eating at the establishment I went to!

Alright alright, so I don’t really take the whole sex aspect of the image of Akihabara as seriously as the people in Colony Drop seemingly do, but looking at lines like this:

With the personal computer, came its two close siblings: video games and anime, and the ever present factor that tied all three together: pornography.

…and this:

It’s the sex and pornography that keeps Akihabara going, and the otaku pay for it.

..and especially this:

Akihabara is little more than a red light district, albeit one with a unique deviancy and a curfew. Anywhere you look, you’re likely to spy the doe-eyed visage of a cartoon girl of indeterminate age, be it on a billboard, a book cover, a pillow or a mouse pad with sculpted breasts, but the sex comes in other forms as well.

…it’s hard not to see Colony Drop’s actual general feelings on otaku and Akihabara. Once again, it’s that old saw about Japanese otaku all being sick perverts who are probably train gropers again. You might think this is just me coming on Colony Drop pretty strong, but this sort of thing is carried throughout this post.

Is this how they think of most Japanese otaku? Remember that last point, where I noted that Sean doesn’t differentiate between creepy otaku and non-creepy otaku, just otaku, non-otaku and tourists? This refusal to differentiate means that my conclusion above is what the writer intends us to think.

Allow me to add a personal note here, one that I repeatedly stressed in the comments of that very post. When I was in Tokyo in August, I had tragically spent most of my time in Akihabara, roaming up and down Chuo-dori and peeking in the occasional side streets, in search of a copy each of all the Super Robot Wars games that came out for PS2 (easily done, thanks to Trader and Mandarake), and a Soul of Chogokin Baikanfu (which I finally got, from Nakano). While there, I saw the maid cafes, porno shops and eroge outlets that were scattered throughout Electric Town.

However, apart from the very rare exception, almost none of these shops were on the main drag of Chuo-dori, where the majority of Akihabara’s traffic was. Instead, they were mostly in the side streets, hidden amongst cheap secondhand game shops, fast food outlets and pachinko parlours. AsoBit City and Gamers had basement floors dedicated to eroge and porn, but they were clearly marked 18+ only. Comic Tora no Ana were similarly marked for their adult doujin floors.

The rest of Akihabara, the facade that was put out to the general public? Anime and manga shops, game centers, pachinko parlours! Maid cafes, which is the only thing remotely sexual put out in the open! Adverts for eroge! And that’s about it!

I won’t deny that there is a strong sexual undercurrent running throughout a lot of Akihabara product. But this is hardly the red-light district that Sean so sensationally suggests it should be surmised so. It’s not innocent, but those maids aren’t asking you for ten thousand yen in exchange for a blowjob. The average maid cafe in Akihabara is about as sexually suggestive as your average Hooters in America, except with girlier food and frillier costumes.

A nice little resting spot from the evil of the Beast.

• So, what is Akihabara, in my own humble opinion?

Akihabara is the world’s biggest and, some would say, the world’s only, large scale geek-oriented shopping district. It is the Beast of Japanese otakudom. It’s influence stretches far and wide across Japan through its anime industry. It thinks of nothing but sucking up money, from ten in the morning when it awakes to feed, to around ten or eleven at night, when it goes back to sleep again, it’s belly full of cash.

Now that I think about it, me and Sean do share some opinions about Akihabara. The difference between us is of simple semantics: I’m an unabashed fan of Japanese animation. I love the stuff. My SoC Baikanfu is testament to that. Not just that, but I’m also accepting of a lot of it. I enjoyed a bit of Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star, I like a lot of giant robot anime and shonen action anime. I like stuff like Once Piece, Gurren Lagaan, Giant Robo and Castle of Cagliostro. And I like tokusatsu, J-drama, Japanese music and Japanese video games.

However, Sean, and Colony Drop seems to resent a lot of Japanese animation in general. Looking through the comments, he only cites one Japanese animation-related place n Japan as being a place for a respectable Japanese animation fan: the Ghibli Museum. Most of the anime–sorry, Japtoons–that are usually favourably blogged about are classic anime, usually from the 1980′s: Akira, Demon City Shinjuku, LoGH, Gunbuster… Hell, one of their categories is basically devoted to anime from 1988! Colony Drop then, is an anime blog that is mostly devoted to nostalgia, lamenting the days when great anime grew on trees and the streets of Shinjuku were paved in gold, only to have been correupted by fanboys and otaku taking over the asylum and ruining everything. This post on Akihabara is just the biggest signifier of that outlook on Japanese animation.

Of course, this outlook isn’t something that I personally agree with at all, considering I’ve written over 2500 words on the subject, but hey, that’s what dissenting opinions are for, right?

Oh, and if for some reason you are in search of dinner and drinks at Akihabara in the evenings, you can’t go wrong than Akiba Ichi in the UDX building, which is pretty close to the entrance to Akihabara train station. They have lots of restaurants there, that serve all kinds of dishes! I went to an okonomiyaki place there called Yukari, and the okonomiyaki I had there really rocked the house! If you get lost in Akihabara as night falls like me and Sean did, you can’t go wrong than going there. Last orders are 9:30 though…

Well, since you asked…

Hanjuku Joshi (“soft-boiled girls”, apparently) is a two volume Yuri manga that ran in Comic Yuri Hime, and has been scanlated in full by Wings of Yuri. It begins as your basic school girl love story, where cute and girly Yae arrives at an all-girls’ school, and finds herself falling in love with the athletic and cool Chitose, and finds herself falling in love with her, with sex and cuteness ensuing.

At first glance, especially in the first volume, it sticks to the tried and true formulas that have gone through the growing Yuri manga genre for quite a while: an all-girls school, a cute young girl, and a cool tomboyish girl, and a sweet romance. But the manga also makes inroads beyond just the thing about these two finding out about their feelings and sharing their love. The manga also deals, however so much obliquely, with these characters trying to deal with whether it’s okay for two girls to love each other. There’s a lot of awkwardness as the two try and sort out their feelings between each other, and the manga gets into how the characters feel about actually being in love with a girl, and how the two characters try and deal with each other’s feelings…

The manga also follows the relationship between Mari, a fashionable high school girl, and Ran, her teacher. Like Chitose and Yae is about two girls trying to find their feelings, Mari and Ran are hardly each other’s first loves, but they are falling in love with each other. Their story could be about two girls who find themselves in a relationship that becomes more fulfilling than they expected, and which slowly turns to love. Like Chitose and Yae, Mari and Ran try to accept that they’re falling in love with each other, and try and have to deal with it.

There’s also a whole lot a shagging going on for all the guys who picked this up expected hot lesbian sex. That’s to be expected of the Yuri genre, especially with it’s high male fanbase. Thankfully, it never really gets in the way, and doesn’t feel like fanservice as it is just a kind of climax for the pairings involved (in more ways than one, har har). Pass Maria holic on the shelf, and go seek out Hanjuku Joshi instead. You’ll be glad you did.

The Maria Holic manga was reviewed by Erica Friedman recently, and it seems pretty obvious that she has quite the hate-on for it, and the series in general. And I sure as hell don’t blame her for this at all, considering it’s the story of a girl who goes to an all-girls school looking for love, and finds herself the metaphorical punching bag for a sadistic, cross-dressing boy who’s apparently at the school for some really dumb reason.

So I went out to my local Forbidden Planet and I skimmed the copy of Volume 1 I got there, and I pretty much decided within the first chapter that this manga is not the manga for me. Of course, since I read Erica’s review first I knew it wouldn’t be, but this manga, even on a brief reading, just isn’t funny.

Most of the comedy is through the main female, Kanako, often going through hell, being insulted, or being threatened with rape at one point by Mariya the cross-dresser if she ever revealed his secret. All because she made the mistake of coming across him first as she entered the school, and then discovered that he’s really a guy. It’s extremely horrible to see, especially when you realise that Kanako is party being bullied by Mariya like this because she likes girls more than men, and it’s played for laughs. And implications that Mariya and Kanako might become a romantic couple? The thought of it is just too horrible to imagine at this juncture. It’ll be like something out of Hot Gimmick.

The rest of the comedy is, from what I can tell, really retarded parodies of Yuri manga tropes, which isn’t all that funny either. This is more like the sub-Colony Drop sadistic “comedy” that would fall flat on it’s face with people who’d have the nearest semblance of a heart. It’s like a gender-warped Love Hina, except that it isn’t as far out, and Mariya doesn’t punch Kanako and send her flying, so it exchanges it for emotional bullying instead.

This manga didn’t even deserve me, an unashamed pervert who likes lesbians a lot, skimming through it at the manga aisle in Forbidden Planet. By any rights, it should be gone and forgotten, just another crappy seinen fanservice manga in a sea of retreads that Tokyopop released for some reason in it’s increasing collapse in the face of Viz and Del Rey.

Recently when I got Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 for my Xbox 360, I was disappointed to find out that, unlike it’s prequel when it was released the year before, there was no Japanese voice track. At all. I’ve hardly played the game (though I hardly actually play games that much any more. or do much of anything except browse the internet), just as I’ve hardly played other Japanese games that didn’t have a Japanese vocal track. If I know that a game has a Japanese vocal track in Japan, but just has English voices over here, I’m just not that interested.

For instance, Frau Bow in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 is horribly flat and unemotional, and really helped to put me off my game when I played it. Whilst some of the characters were alright, Frau just really stuck out and took me out of the game. Persona 4 has slightly better voice acting, but the inability to change to Japanese voices (which had some anime voices actors who count among my favourites) infuriated me and turned me off. Same with Disgaea when I discovered the game only had English voices. It might be a piddling thing, but as not all English voice tracks in Japanese games can be like as in the Metal Gear Solid series (and even so… Listen to Otacon crying in 2! I’m pretty sure the Japanese version didn’t sound like that!) .

When I watch anime on DVD, I usually just turn on the Japanese vocal track, with the rare exception on the off-chance that the dub is actually pretty good, such as the Miyazaki movies, or Cowboy Bebop. To be fair, I’m not exactly a staunch crusader for having everything in Japanese, that’s just my preference. The Podtoid discussion pretty much encapsulated my problems with English voice acting: the fact that it’s not at all taken seriously in the Western countries, and that they just don’t care about putting in a good performance: Chad Concelmo, for example, talks about knowing a casting director who casts video games. She hardly actually plays video games, only stuff like Karaoke Revolution, and she has to be shown how to select songs to play using the joypad. And these are the kind of people who cast voice actors in video games, niche translated Japanese games such as Dynasty Warriors Gundam, the Persona games, Disgaea (which came to the UK without a Japanese vocal track).

Frankly, I’m inclined to agree. Being a big anime fan, I’m inclined to expect the dramatic, often over the top voice acting that usually appears in anime. When it’s replaced by bland line readings in English, I don’t get into it as much as I would if it was in Japanese. You can call it personal preference, you can call it me being a weeaboo (then Topher Cantler can come around and knock your block off), but I’d at least like the option to switch between English and Japanese on the fly. Or at least the English dubbing companies to take dubbing video games seriously…!

However, there were still some things left hanging that, mostly due to time or other extenuating circumstances, I regret not having, or in some cases having been done. So that’s why, for my first post about my time in Japan, I’m going to put down a little list of things that I have regretted after leaving Japan…

• I regret not renting a mobile phone as soon as I entered Japan: “Mobile phone rental? Bah! It’s all I Japanese. If it’s Tokyo, it should be easy to get on the internet from any street corner! That’s how it is in London, why not here?” How wrong I bloody was! It turns out that apparently Japanese people do most of their internet access on the go using their mobiles, so I was stuck without any way to properly twit or blog on the go. This made hell for me to organise any interviews, because I was out and about most of the time, and when I found a mobile rental place in Akihabara, they just happened to have no phones that could access the internet. When I’m coming back to Japan, I’m renting a phone as soon as the plane touches down.

• I regret not trying to find a battery charger for my camera: I would’ve been pretty easy, but I thought that if I was frugal with how long I kept my phone on, I could’ve made the battery last for the whole two weeks. Well, I did manage to pull it off, at the expense of my not having as many photographs as I have would liked. I could’ve gotten some pretty great sights on camera, like my night time walk in Odaiba, if I wasn’t so worried about the battery that I didn’t take my camera with me to some places. It’s a pity, because it was a good camera.

• I regret not checking my Marantz recorder and microphone before I left England: God. This is a very bitg regret. I should’ve known more than to place my trust in my university in taking care of their equipment before I rented it. But then long and short of it was that I ended up bringing a bunch of dead weight with me that I didn’t even know it was until I turned it on and tried to record with it. The result is one trashed interview, one missed opportunity, and one late return back to the hatch….

• I regret not getting more comfortable clothes to wear for Comiket: My usual pair of blue jeans was feeling mighty uncomfortable in the 30′C Tokyo heat, and I had the feeling that  if I wore them any longer, they might’ve fallen apart on me. My black jeans already got holes in them, but they were at least more comfortable to wear. However, sport socks were a rather good idea, especially after the laces broke on my usual pair of shoes and I had to wear the trainers everywhere. More sports socks are definitely on my list for tomorrow.

• I regret not visiting any shrines or other landmarks in the city, with the exception of the Washinomiya Shrine, the Imperial Palace and the Tokyo Tower: I admit it, I spent most of my time in Tokyo, if not at Comiket, then at Akihabara. Akihabara, being the Otaku capital of the world, was always a priority spot for me, but I didn’t have any idea of the beast that stood right in the middle of Tokyo until I actually visited it. Despite, unlike some other people I know of, not going utterly crazy with the expenditure – the most I bought was a PSP with games, and a Soul of Chogokin Baikanfu, which was one of my big priorities in Japan anyway… -  There was so much to scratch beneath the surface in Akihabara that I spent a lot of my time in there, instead of other places I wanted to visit, like Osaka, Kyoto or Atami. It didn’t help that I couldn’t find a Go Go Curry anywhere other than in Akihabara either…

• I regret walking from the Imperial Palace to the Tokyo Tower for an hour: I figured that if I could see the Tokyo Tower in the distance from the Imperial Palace, I could’ve walked it easily. Unfortunately, I’m not a very good expert at scale (my idea of size as it accounts for everything in my life seems to only distinguish between small, medium, big, large and extra-large). The result was an hour of walking, and aching legs, as I arrived at the Tokyo Tower. And then there was the lines to get into the Tower…

• I regret not using the baths more than I should: Just out of courtesy for my fellow man here. It didn’t help that my hotel’s communal bath was closed from 9am to 5pm, and it had “ladies hours” from 9pm to midnight, so it was extremely hard for me to both get a bath and a good night’s sleep…

• And finally… I regret not staying longer: It was hardly even two weeks at all!

Now where did I put my writing mojo…