I’m toying with a new concept for Jet Peeves.  Thinking that I could possibly take advantage of the animation scrubber tool that comes with my newly acquired Wacom Inkling (digital pen).  Here’s something I whipped up earlier.  The drawing of this thing took around 5 minutes which is reason enough to stick with this format!  It gets me drawing a lot faster!

Anyway, here it is!

Click here to view the embedded video.

If this spins off into an actual new format for JET Peeves then rest assured you’ll hear about it here first!  Stay tuned!

-Christopher

I don’t need this, but I’m going to buy it anyway.

I’d already used the ‘learning Japanese’ excuse when I purchased my Playstation 2 in an earlier post about the subject.  So why do you or I need a PS Vita?  Well, because it’s absolutely bloody wonderful.  There you go, perfectly adequate console review comparable to the best gaming websites out there.  But really, when you hold this thing, you feel like there is something special about it that probably makes it the ideal platform for immersing yourself in Japanese.  But is it? Let’s take a look.

Importing

Assuming you can actually get your hands on a PS Vita, importing games on the PS Vita is insanely easy thanks to the Japanese PSN Store.  That’s right, no more waiting years and years to see if your favourite Japanese game will be released in the UK!  If you want a game that’s out in Japan, you can download it here and now.  You’ll require prepaid Japanese Yen cards which are available from places such at PlayAsia.com if you want to purchase anything that isn’t free.  I happened to pick up my Japanese PS Vita one day after release on Dec. 17th 2011, but when it comes out in the U.S. or the UK, you’ll still have access to the Japanese version of the online store.

Once you have your PS Vita and you’ve signed up for a Japanese account, you’ll be presented with plenty of wonderful menus full of Kanji you won’t understand.

In addition to all the fantastic PS Vita games that are coming out, you’ll also be able to download pretty much every PSP game that came out in Japan through the online store.  Genius.  If we’re comparing to the Nintendo 3DS it’s worth pointing out that the Vita is not region locked but the 3DS is so playing import titles is actually possible.

Playing In Japanese

So why do you need a PS Vita when you already have a Japanese PS2 or Nintendo DS? The answer lies in the beautiful 5″ OLED screen.  Whether you can claim such a thing to be ‘HD’ or not (you can’t), really doesn’t matter because this screen is sharp, and as such reading Kanji characters on it is a breeze!  Ever tried reading Kanji on a Nintendo DS? Yeah, pretty much impossible.  Though I suppose you could buy the jumbo size DSi XL…and look ridiculous.

A fantastic thing about the current generation of games is the amount of work that’s going into them.  Voice acting is standard these days which is incredibly helpful if you’re working on your Japanese listening skills.  The Vita has games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss which is fully voiced and well known as one of the best produced games out there.

The Vita’s operating system is a much improved version of the XMB we had on the PSP.  Apps, settings and games are all accessed the same way, through bubbly icons.  I don’t really like the bubbly look, but you can change the background image for every page of icons which makes it all a little more bearable.  Multi-tasking is a simple case of clicking the PS button and swiping left or right.

This brings me to a crucial improvement of the Vita over the PSP and PS3.  Touch screen.  If you’re stumped by a game or just need to look something up, accessing and utilising the web browser is 1 million times better and easier than the PSP.  On the PSP you swapped tabs by holding down button combinations, typed by navigating the horrendous on-screen keyboard, and then waited as you watched NONE of your websites actually load.  That’s because the PSP sucked in that respect.  Fortunately, the Vita’s touch screen means you that you can pinch, zoom, drag and tap to your heart’s content.  It is actually useable now.

Portability and features

You’re not going to use it for studying if you never bring it anywhere with you, and the Vita is actually a little larger than the PSP was before it, but it’s surprisingly light.  You probably won’t be tucking it your pocket, but adding it to your purse or man-bag is going to add very little weight to it.  Holding it in one hand also feels fairly comfortable which is important if you’re drawing kanji into your Japanese dictionary with one hand, and playing the Vita with the other.

The console itself is choc full of nifty features.  Twin cameras, microphone, stereo sound, nice screen, 3G/wifi, 2 analogue sticks and the a rear-facing touchpad make it basically the ideal place to find cool new games.  The reason I mention this is because even from the very little of it that I’ve played, I’ve found the Vita to be incredibly engaging.  The combination of ergonomic design, PS3-esque graphics and web connectivity means you probably won’t just leave it on the shelf or in a drawer for years on end, as I did with my PSP.

Nice that you can put a wrist strap on either side of it too.  Or if my students in Japanese jr. high school get the Vita, probably add straps to both sides.  It won’t be unlike the old days when you had fluffy tassels hanging from both ends of the handlebars on your tricycle.  Or anything else that you might hang tassels from in pairs.  Just sayin’.

Games

What can/will you be able to play on this thing?  Well, I don’t have an exhaustive list, but here are a few highlights.

RPG – Disgaea 3, Lord of Apocalypse, Final Fantasy X and FF Type-0

Action/Adventure – Gravity Rush

Shooter – Super Stardust

Sports – Hot Shots Golf, Fifa

Driving/Racing – Ridge Racer, F1 2011, WipEout 2048

Platformer – Little Big Planet

Music – Project Diva

Visual Novel – Little Busters

Puzzle – Lumines

Fighting – BlazBlue, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3

Should you get one?

Here’s what I think – The Vita is a little pricey so it’ll cost you the same if not more than a PS3 at the moment.  But for that cash, you get a console which looks almost as good in terms of graphics, and the bonus that it’s almost pocketable.  If you opt for 3G, you’ll be tweeting, browsing, and gaming on the go which was one of the things I enjoyed the most when I used to commute in London.  Compared to the DS, the Vita offers you a VASTLY larger selection of Japanese games seeing as you need only to download them from the PSN store.  The screen is also readable unlike the low-res DS.  Compared to the iPad, the Vita feels more immersive perhaps because the games seem less pick up and play.  It’s a console for people who miss the ‘core gaming’ experience.  And that works well for people looking for ways to immerse themselves in Japanese language.

A couple things to note however.  Many games will refuse to even switch on if you don’t have a PS Vita memory card.  Make sure you get one if you want to play pretty much anything at all.  Also, as far as I’m aware you can only use one PSN account on the device which means choosing between the Japanese store and the UK or US stores.  There’s conflicting information about this at the moment.  And I’m not totally certain but I think you’ll still be able to play games sold on PS Vita game cartridges, but online features and game downloading will be restricted to a single region, whichever you choose.

If you’ve got a PSP and you’ve been shopping on the Japanese store for ages now, then you probably don’t need a Vita.  Many of the new games are already available on the PSP.  But if you have neither, then the Vita is great way to access a world of games in Japanese.  It’s also a really great way to know keep up with what my students are playing.  Being an assistant language teacher on the Jet Programme is so much easier when you can actually understand what students are talking about when they name all the latest games, comics and light novels!  I’m finding that many kids, often the more difficult ones, are happy to come up to me and try to speak English just because they want to talk about Anime or music they like.

Admittedly much of that is an excuse and I’ll probably end up playing music games like Project Diva more than anything else!

Peace.

-Christopher

On this day, 1 year ago, I was on a Narita Express train to the airport. I was leaving Japan after a 4 week stay at the Nihon Kogakuin art college in Kamata, Tokyo. Reading from my diary that day, I feel all the excitement that I’d built up at that point. I’d studied drawing with a living legend, I’d made awesome new friends, and I had a goal. Draw a comic. An excerpt from my diary is as follows -

08:32:14
Sitting in the narita express now…going to the airport! … I think that I’m comfortable with leaving japan because I know that one day I will come back. Zettai zettai! … I will make issue one of my manga. And I will sell it at the MCM expo in May. That gives me roughly 6 months to get ready. 6 months…can I do it? …Bo chan and sato sensei are depending on me! I have to show them that their effort wasn’t wasted!

It’s really strange to read all that having got to that stage I’m at now. And where is that exactly? Well, one year on, and I’m back in Japan, just as I’d hoped in my diary albeit now as a JET participant. And did I make my comic? Well, yes, but we didn’t sell it haha! It was free and distributed through MCMBuzz.com.

I think I’m proud of finding my way back to Japan. It really is the proverbial rabbit hole though. Whether its drawing, teaching, or just speaking Japanese, the further I get the more complicated I discover it to be.

And I’m having fun! Every day is hilarious at the school where I teach. Even found one of the kids drew a picture of me on their test paper (i might add: while later correcting the mistakes, not while actually taking the test). I’ve actually done quite a lot of drawing since arriving here but I’m not sure where I’ll take it in the new year. I might continue with my JET Peeves webcomic, but I’d also like to do something that combines better with my job, perhaps in the form of a comic my students can read and use to learn English. Plenty of possiblities, just not enough time to put it all into action!

Well, this’ll have to be only a very quick post so I can sleep well before work tomorrow. Got a portrait commission to finish and a demonstration lesson to plan this week, but I’ll hopefully find time to post again this week. Got a buncha photos I need to put up still!

So it’s time for a reboot.  It’s time to figure out what goals I had set for myself before I came here and how many of them I’ve managed to make progress on.  Let’s see…goals…ah yes I didn’t set any.  Rats!  Ok well maybe I set a few.  Oh yes, learn Japanese.  The number 1 lesson I took away from the Tokyo orientation for JET participants.  Well, here’s a product review to start that one off!

iPhone App Review – ‘JAPANESE’

Yes.  This dictionary app is annoying called ‘Japanese’ which means that typing it into Google will result in

About 1,470,000,000 results (0.13 seconds)

Thanks Google.  Anyway, if you’re like me, you know almost no Kanji save for the few ones for eating and drinking.  Well, enter ‘Japanese’, an app by ‘Code from Tokyo’ (which I highly recommend you type into Google if ‘Japanese’ returns no helpful results.  Anyway, it goes for $9.99 and has a killer feature.  Flash cards.  And not just any old flash cards, but flash cards using the spaced repetition system ‘SRS’.

It may not seem important from just looking at it, but basically if you tap ‘Wrong’, then that same flashcard will get reshuffled into the deck and reappear about 4 or 5 cards later.  That same card will attack you over and over again until you tap ‘Correct’ enough times to get it into the ‘Learned’ pile.  I’ve learned almost 400 words this way.  It is awesome.  In fact the current list I took a screenshot of above is from the ‘JLPT Level 5′ list which is convenient if you’re studying for the Japanese language proficiency test soon.

So, that’s the studying part, but what’s so great about a dictionary app?  Well, in addition to being a genius study aid, it also has the custom list making features that made ‘Kotoba’ such a great dictionary app.  Except that ‘Japanese’ is that little bit more intelligent because it searches for word matches in real time as you draw the kanji and can also search for word compounds (2 or more kanji to form one word) knowing that the one you’re drawing ‘Begins’ or ‘Ends’ the word you’re looking for.

Oh, and just to show you how well the iPhone/iPad keyboard works, here’s a screenshot to show you how badly you can draw the kanji and still have it recognised by the app.

Ok. But what’s so great about being able to look up kanji?  Well, obviously so you can read One Piece!

Gotta say, I was pretty excited when I found out I could buy these giant versions of One Piece.  I’m only on chapter 33 in the English version so being able to start with chapter 1 again in its original large format is awesome!  Add to that the fact that it only cost about 700 yen (£4.50) for 41 chapters.

Anyway, the true excellence comes from the fact that any list of words that you make can be viewed as flash cards simply by tapping the ‘Study’ button in the top right hand corner of the app.  It uses the exact same SRS flash card system and currently I have lists for many different manga, games and a number of lists of everyday necessities and school words.

The cultural bit – Taiko and Pocky

Ok, pocky first.  Unless you have an aversion to calendars, you’ll have likely come across the recent 11/11/11 novelty.  A day for remembrance and apparently, Pocky!  We had a party and ate French toast.  It was great.

I thought I’d missed 11:11 am on the day but as I left to walk to class I realised it was 11:10 still and so I ran to my 1st year junior high school classroom and made it just in time to point at the clock and utter ‘Look! Look! LOOK’ over and over again until everyone understood what I was on about.  It was pretty darned cute, the kids all clapped to celebrate!  It so happens that pocky is not unlike the number ’1′ in shape and so the clever bods at Pocky claimed the day for their ultra popular snack.

Then today was the Agricultural festival in my town (it’s been non-stop festivals for me every weekend for months by the way).  As far as I can tell, August is the start of ‘Matsuri’ season and it basically doesn’t end until Christmas hehe.  Anyway, my fellow JET teaching friends are members of the Taiko drumming group that played today so I got a quick photo on my el-cheapo softbank flip phone.

Drawing and other things

I’m getting back into drawing too!  The art teacher at my school was super awesome and put my sketches from ‘sketching day’ up on some boards just for me at the school ‘Bunkasai’ (culture festival).  I was super pleased

The art teacher at my school is so nice to me!

I’m also making progress on a portrait commission for a chap back home so it feels good to be drawing again!

Anyway, I’ll have to leave it there so as to not ruin my pledge to sleep early and eat properly!  But more excitingness will surely come  Laters!

-Christopher

I'm a Creap. I'm a weirdo.

It was hideous.  I don’t know who they’re trying to fool.  I don’t know of any powder yielding cows.

A newer, better, English

Well, after 2.5 hours of grading papers today (no joke, I get all the fun jobs), I began to wonder if perhaps my first years aren’t spelling-ly challenged, but are in fact trying to improve the English language.  Upon closer inspection it would appear that the changes they are proposing are indeed, preferable to the originals.  Or at least…worthy additions to the repertoire.  Of the more entertaining ones are -

“Fabruary” – Maybe a more flamboyant month.  32 days as standard.

“Morch” – For when you just can’t get enough torch.

“Septembar” – Get through the first month back at school with compulsory visits to your local drinking establishment.

“Momday” – Can’t think of a many mothers who would disagree with this.

“Manday” – Not sure what I was pretending to be every other day of the week.

Language resource investment

Japanese is a hard language to learn, there’s no arguing there, but these days there are multitudinous resources to help you out.  Among them, is this particularly fantastic website ‘Erin’s Challenge’ pointed out by my fellow ALT Ryan who also teaches in Chiba.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s genius and I highly recommend it!  I don’t actually know how far it goes in terms of level but for beginners like myself who have no formal Japanese education it’s just about perfect.  I think the particular strength of Erin’s Challenge is that the videos aren’t insultingly simplistic.  Within each video is usually a slightly higher level of grammar and vocabulary than you might be prepared for by that point, but getting used to picking out the Japanese words you *do* understand is a skill you’ll need from day to day anyway so it’s good practice!

Apart from Erin’s Challenge and burying my head in the Genki 1 textbook, I figured that the ‘immersion’ method might work best for me and as a bonus it gave me a great excuse to buy a games console!  I own a 3DS, a Playstation3 and an xbox360 among other toys back home in the UK, but my console of choice here in Japan was the Playstation 2 introduced over a decade ago.

Having a Japanese games console (PS2 in particular) is a great option for a number of reasons -

1.) Voice Acting – Many Japanese games are filled with cute/scary/hilarious characters and as such voice acting and short dialogue scenes are common in even the most simple of puzzle games.  Visual Novels are your friend as they allow you to ‘play’ some really great stories with the added benefit of being able to replay any line of dialogue at will.

2.) Moderately priced – Sure, a used PS2 costs about $30 everywhere else in the world, but a used PS2 costs half as much as a used PS3 in Japan!  The PS3 costs nearly $300 used, and the PS2 costs $150.

3.) Back Catalogue – The PS3 and xbox360 have incredible graphics, this cannot be disputed.  But in many cases games are ported over from PS2 to the PS3 with no alterations whatsoever.  The same used game on PS2 for 1200 yen might sell for 4500 yen on the PS3.  In addition, where the PS3 section will have maybe 1 big wall of about 100 games, nearby will be a PS2 section with 500 games.  If you’re looking for language practice you don’t really need the newest iteration of Tekken 6 or Metal Gear Solid 4 or Crash Bandicoot 99,002.

Oh and add to that the ability to play the entire PS1 back catalogue too and you’re definitely on to a winner.

4.) Japanese ‘Used’ = Brand New – Recently in Tokyo I found a shop with a whole section labeled as ‘no guarantee’ which means you can’t return them if in fact they don’t work when you get home.  However, something wonderful about Japan is that people here take incredibly good care of their belongings albeit for short periods of time.  This means that games are often sold for 100 yen (about 80p or $1.50)  and they are still in mint condition.

Furigana

If you don’t understand kanji, like me, then furigana is your friend!  I picked up Dragon Quest IX on the Nintendo DS for roughly $15 and it is complete with mini – hiragana words which tell you how to pronounce certain kanji.  In games without voice acting, this little feature is an absolute necessity.  I generally play my Dragon Quest on the train with my iPad running Kotoba (a free japanese dictionary).  Kotoba is the literally the best thing in the world as it allows you to bookmark words you learn into separate lists.  This way, you can create a DragonQuest-list or an Erin’s Challenge-list and help yourself to learn new words by grouping them according to where you first heard them.

[update: since originally writing this post I've upgraded to the dictionary iOS app 'Japanese' which costs about £7 and is better than 'Kotoba' in some ways (to be discussed in a further post)]

The Cultural Bit

Last week I managed to weed my way into a rice cutting session in the neighbouring town here in Chiba.  It was crazy fun!  I had it in my head that rice cutting involved swinging a giant Death scythe like a ribbon dancer but, alas, what I was presented with was much less fearsome.

Important educational point of the day – “Don’t cut your thumb off”.  I appreciated and followed this advice dilligently.

I also managed to find some live music happening in Chiba.  Asahi holds an annual gig with many wicked bands.

The guy pictured above is kinda famous around here for being a rockstar and running bar simultaneously.  Pretty awesome.

Spider Removal Techniques

It’s typhoon season in Japan and spiders seem to be flooding into my flat from every orifice.  To combat this menace, I’ve been working on my spider removal technique.  I tend not to like killing the little monsters outright so I’ve taken to a more Let-Freedom-Spin approach.  Originally this involved a small plastic container with a lid, but following an unfortunate encounter between the plastic edge and a particularly fast moving arachnid I moved up to a larger container.  Hopefully now I can avoid squashing the poor guys.

Actually, the clipboard used to be for drawing but sliding a piece of flimsy cardboard underneath the plastic container was not sufficing and so the clipboard supplements the cardboard and together they keep the spider safely in captivity until I can bring him/her back to the wild.

So what’s this got to do with teaching?

Ok, I realise there was remarkably little content in this article about being a teacher.  I also realise I’ve been painfully slow in releasing drawing of any kind but I am in the middle of a JET reboot.  Turns out after 3 months of being in a place you fall into lazy habits and I’m kick starting myself on multiple things this week!  More soon…

-Christopher

So!  Here’s a  short comic that I sketched out after a fun day teaching English at an elementary school here in Chiba.  It’s inspired by something I saw during a lesson I had just been teaching and it reminded me of someone’s English speech at the recent speech contest.  The speech had been called ‘Mottainai’ and was all about saving energy during the summer and getting into a good habit of not being wasteful.

I like the phrase ‘mottainai’ but sometimes kids just wanna have fun and leave an electric pencil sharpener running .  Who wouldn’t?!

Hope you enjoyed that!  I’ll post soon about the recent things I’ve been getting up to in Japan

-Christopher

Ok. Bedtime.

-Christopher

Today’s Jet Peeves is on the subject of ‘Stage 2′.  The stage where it all goes wrong, but hopefully before it all picks back up and feels happy again…hopefully.

click to read

Stage 2 party at my house imminent.

-Christopher

Settling in part 2

Actually the past week has been a continuation of the settling in antics of the previous couple weeks except that this time I’ve transformed back in the productive workaholic version of myself which I’d feared was left behind in the UK.  Thankfully not!  After a coffee with the wonderful and ever so talented Bo-chan I got back into drawing (albeit fast and not particularly well thought out) comics in the form of Jet Peeves – a new webcomic and Jet Peeves – I’m British Really.  My desk is finally set up for drawing digitally or analog…ly.

practically needed a 2nd suitcase to get my Tablet over to Japan

As part of ‘settling in’ I’ve decided that I should do as I do back home which is to frantically spend money on Amazon.<insert country domain here>.  Of the more useful purchases this includes the bi-lingual version of ‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’ which I picked up for something like 1300 yen (£9-£10).

complete with 1980's style monkey island hint decoder

Sadly, even with the book in two languages side by side, it’s still years beyond my current reading level.  And that’s not even counting my poor level Japanese!

Sorting out the essentials

Until last week I’d managed to get myself a car, connect to an internet provider, get a bank account and a Gaijin resident’s card, but I was still missing something that no Englishman can live without.  An Umbrella A mobile phone!  I happened to be passing through Tokyo and after harassing some poor Japanese phone representatives, discovered that a man called Don Quixote could help me find one.  Actually it’s a not a man, it’s a shop.  And it’s not Don Quixote, it’s ?????? (Don Ki ho~te) which is close enough right?  Well, I basically asked for the cheapest pre-paid phone I could get and somehow walked away, for the minimal expenditure  of 7000 yen (£50), with a very capable, very cool, white Japanese flip phone with…wait for it…a TV built in!

"Plutonium?! Are you telling me this sucker's nuclear??"

Apart from the lack of predictive text input, this phone is the bee’s knees.  The tv is clearer than the shoddy quality of my freeview digital box running my actual tv at the moment.

Get a haircut, get a Japanese lesson

Whilst hanging around Tokyo, I figured I might as well get myself a haircut, and what better a place than the style capital of the world, Harajuku!  In fact, I managed to get it for the bargain-ous price of 3200 yen (£20) but the real surprise was how much Japanese language practice I got!  The chap doing the haircut was so chatty that even though I had a towel on my face and was unable to listen because of the running water he kept asking my questions!  Essentially though it was the most Japanese practice I’ve had so far and I think I’ll be using that as an excuse to get my hair cut more frequently!

Stage 2 – (The i-wanna-go-home-bit)

If there’s one thing in particular that I thought was TOTALLY OVERDONE at the Tokyo Orientation for JETs, it was the ridiculous you-will-feel-like-this-at-this-exact-time-and-in-this-exact-way comments which filled a number of speeches (there were a couple that didn’t, and to you, congratulations).  I know that the assistants want to help ease you into the Japanese lifestyle, but seriously, no one really likes a know-it-all.  Well anyway, apparently everyone goes through ‘stage 2′ which is the part *after* the euphoria of arriving in a Japan and thinking it’s really cool.  Supposedly you’re supposed to become disillusioned with the JET experience and potentially even collapse on the floor in the middle of a supermarkets crying.  Not ideal.

Well actually, despite my complaints in the preceding paragraph, I have to say, this ‘stage 2′ malarky is probably true as much as I hate to admit it.  I had my first taste of it the other day while cycling away from the centre of town and into the abyss known as the countryside.  Essentially my thoughts boiled down to this -

click to read

It’s fine, I have a Clannad glass

Really though, my brush with the imminence of ‘Stage 2′ was only fleeting, and with enough junk food and shopping I reckon it’s possible to steer clear of the worst of it.  And anyway, I have this amazing Clannad glass with Nagisa Furukawa on it, so how could I possibly feel down?

Complete with the Dango Daikazoku in the back ^_^

School starts up this week and my job as an ALT will properly begin.  Wish me luck

-Christopher

I kid you not, when I told this woman I where I came from she actually had to leave the room and have a giggle before coming back to confirm that there was no way in hell my parents were English.  Actually when I told her my parents were Chinese she still didn’t believe me.  Hopefully I’ll actually learn Japanese and then I’ll just lie and say I was born in Japan.  Probably served me right for trying to use my colloquial Japanese slang.  She actually wasn’t really that malicious, but it was funny all the same

-Christopher