Izumi Konata’s House

Sorry, I haven’t been posting recently, but I’ve been super busy finishing up the work that was left to me after Obon.  I do have yet another post about travel :D.  This time it’s the Isumi Konata house in Satte, Saitama.  It’s a recently opened “tourist attraction” where the district is attempting to draw anime fans and their spending to the area by refurbishing a house in a manner that is consistent with Isumi Konata’s house from Lucky Star.  If you are a Lucky Star fan that’s planning on going, I strongly suggest you bring someone with you that knows Japanese.

The taxi driver was lost, but once I saw the mailbox I knew we were there.

Comiket 76 Reflections

For those who don’t know, Comiket takes place twice every year and is the largest anime/manga related expo in the world.  It’s set up like a market place where booths sell large amounts of goods, commerical and indie ones.  It takes place at the Tokyo Big Sight in Odaiba, Tokyo from 10AM-4PM on for three days.  It draws around 550,000 participants, so it is not to be underestimated.  I have never seen bigger lines in my life.

I guess I’ll  provide a bit of a brief article on Comiket 76 and my experience to hopefully help out other people who are heading there without experience to make this more interesting.

The line at 12:45AM

May’n Love and Joy Summer Tour 2009

Heya everyone,

In an effort to post more often, I’m going to make a post about what I did today :).  I attended a live concert starring May’n (メイン） or May Nakabayashi at Zepp Nagoya.  I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned having tickets for this concert on my blog, mainly because I forgot I had the tickets until the day before yesterday, oops :P.

Sorry Miku, I'm not listening to your songs this time.

Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari Lyrics and Translation. Bakemonogatari ED

To my friends who want more Japan stuff, I haven’t posted anything anime related recently, so let me post one!!!!

In any case, one of my recommends and subsequent favorites for the Summer 2009 anime season is Bakemongatari.  In particular, I was entranced by the ending.  Composed by esteemed vocaloid composer, Ryo/Supercell, and sung by Nico Nico diva Gazelle, imo this is a masterpiece.

Shirakawa Village or perhaps better known as… Hinamizawa

Heya,  I seem to be averaging one post every 4 days or so, which is pretty terrible.  Nonetheless, I’m very grateful for all 3o or so of you who read my blog :).

Today’s post is about Hinamizawa Shirakawa Village, which is located in the northern corner of Gifu prefecture and about 250 kilometers away from Nagoya.  Most of you probably don’t know, but Shirakawa village also happens to be the village that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and its sequel Kai was based on.  I hope I’m not imagining the resemblance :P.

Hinamizawa...

Hinamizawa... no I mean Shirakawa

Gundam The First, Nagoya

Heya, it’s been a while since I posted, but I’ve been super busy with all sorts of random things.  Not the least of which was finishing off summative assignments for two different PDENG courses.  Ugh… the horror that is PDENG.  Anyway today I’m going to talk about a Gundam Expo that was held in Port Messe, Nagoya.  It’s one of the few times that Nagoya actually gets a special event before Tokyo :P.  It’s a massive event celebrating the 30th anniversary of Gundam (has it really been that long?).  Hit the jump for more info.

Just a small portion of the MASSIVE line that was 3 hours long even if you had advance tickets....

Hatsune Miku Project Diva Motion Capture

I was putting off unlocking the Ren and Rin versions of certain songs in Project Diva because I really don’t like them that much.  But I finally finished Project Diva by unlocking all the songs, and in the credits under motion capture a girl called Ogura Yui is mentioned :S.  I always thought Miku’s dances were a bit loli-ish, but the mystery is solved!

A quick check on a 2ch reveals that she’s a 13 year old idol who Sega motion captured for the game, and a video started floating around on Nico Nico Douga of the dancer doing the dance herself compared with the Hatsune Miku in the game.  Looks like Sega did a pretty awesome job.

FictionJunction Yuki Kajiura Live Everlasting Songs Tour 2009

Heya guys,

I posted a while ago about getting tickets to a FictionJunction Live, but the event finally happened on wednesday, woohoo!  The concert was GREEAATTTTTT, now my FictionJunction and Kalafina mp3’s all sound markedly dull compared to the life performance.  I have no idea how to report an event where I was banned from taking pictures at, but I’ll give it a shot.

eew that was a bad pic. Stupid auto mode.

Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

Heya everyone,

I know I’m about two weeks late on the bandwagon, but theatres were so insanely packed for this movie that I couldn’t get decent tickets.  After the first movie my love for Evangelion had dropped to new lows.  After all, the so called “bold reimagining” of the original series in Eva 1.0 was nothing about less than 10 minutes of new footage in total.  However, with the persuasion of three Japanese coworkers I decided to go watch it.  The spoilers and plot summaries have been covered by stunning number of English blogs despite the fact that the movie is only available in Japanese with no subtitles, so I’m not going to do that.  I guess I’ll post a few impressions and call it a day :P.  *Makes sad face* I guess knowing enough Japanese to watch the movie isn’t anything special :(.

Eva 2.0 Movie Poster

Hatsune Miku Project Diva!

Heya everyone,

I apologize for the lack of posts recently but it’s been due to three reasons: Wimbledon, PDeng, and Project Diva.  Being the vocaloid fan that I am, I’ve been totally enamored with this game.

Today’s post is about Project Diva, the newly released game for the PSP from Sega.  In a nutshell, it’s essentially a fairly robust rhythm game rebranded with Hatsune Miku.  Read on for my take on the game :).

It looks to have been selling like hot cakes in Japan, makes me wonder if they’ll do a sequel.  If you pre-order the game, it comes with a special Puchi nendroid.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as detailed as this one.

UMD + Nendroid Puchi