Author Archives: dpkworldwide

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About dpkworldwide

Native Californian, water rabbit, aries, lover of travel, trains, history, music, wrestling, anime, minimalism, stoicism, objectivism and things Japanese.

Anime FEAST!

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I thought I may as well take a moment to talk about the absolute feast of anime I’ve been watching lately—basically every night since I returned home. After all, I had a lot of catching up to do: I had a few dozen new DVDs show up in my absence from various standing- and pre-orders. It also helped me through my melancholy for Japan—although I’m not sure what state it really got me to…

I’ve caught up with the latest Hikaru no Go, Gundam Seed: Destiny, Hare + Guu and Kodocha releases, and found some fun new titles in Tactics, Tenchi in Tokyo, Anime Runner Kuromi, Law of Ueki and Full Moon. I really liked Tactics, and I think it’ll turn out to be an interesting story—I liked the characters a lot, especially lead character Kantaro Ichinomiya, resident folklorist and demon slaying shrine priest. The other one that was surprisingly fun was Full Moon. Yes, I know it’s a shojo anime, but I’m not afraid to say I like shojo anime. The first DVD was a tiny bit slow, but I’ve already enjoyed the characters and the animation is very good. Of course, my favorite is Takuto, the death spirit with cat ears—he’s fun! Law of Ueki also looks like it will be entertaining—sort of like a Zatch Bell in reverse. I like Ueki’s attitude and green, spiky hair.

But I have to give the prize to one that I’d been debating about for a long time and finally grabbed when the complete box set was on sale: Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. It has to be the ultimate Otaku anime, and I was laughing out loud almost from the beginning. I’ll definitely have to start getting my anime section of this website filled out with reviews, links and photos, and I may start with this one. It is geared slightly toward older viewers (they constantly seem to be searching for and buying those kind of doujinshi…), and it’s certainly not for my niece and nephews—in fact, it’ll probably be funniest to fellow otaku like me. One of the most brilliant things is the OVA “embedded” inside the show—Kujibiki Unbalance—which plays the part of the current favorite anime of the Genshiken club members. There are three complete episodes (1, 22, and 25) of this non-existant series on the DVDs as bonus Materials. It even has an incredibly catchy title song, which I immediately had to find online and put on my iPod. I suppose that’s more than enough to prove that I really am otaku…and damn proud of it, too! And to make it even more fun, they leave the OVA with a cliffhanger on the next-to-last episode too—AAAAAAARRRGGHHH!!!

Of course, as well as being a lot of fun, it also made me nostalgic for Tokyo: the Tokyo Big Sight made a couple of appearances, along with very recognizable Akihabara, Kanda and other locations. It’s both fun—since I can recognize the places and things I see— and troubling. Troubling because it’s making me yearn to go back even more than I am already. I suppose that’ll be something I’ll be dealing with for the rest of my life now…

Hollywood Bowl Evening

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After spending a relatively OK final day of the week at work (WOW—yet another week gone by already since returning home from Japan), I drove to the Chatsworth Metrolink station to meet my family and ride the shuttle bus to the Hollywood Bowl. It’s been a long time, and it was a lot of fun.The program was an extravaganza of Celtic music—which I think is what I saw on my last trip to the bowl. They even had the Kennelly Irish Dancers perform.

The guest conductor of the L.A. Phil was one Bramwell Tovey, an Englishman and wonderful conductor. More than that, he was hysterically funny and really made the audience have a good time. I’ve always enjoyed that dry, wicked English sense of humor, and he didn’t disappoint. The Orchestra was superb as usual, and you couldn’t have hoped for a more beautiful evening, especially after our recent heat waves. It was really lovely having a picnic out under the stars with cool breezes and beautiful music wafting through the air. This is the way it should be living in So. Cal. in the summertime…

Places like this really are special and I’m lucky to have the opportunity of enjoying them once in a while in my very own home town.

End of the Work Week

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It’s hard to believe, but I’ve come to the end of my first work week. I know it was only three days, but it seemed longer, probably because of the quantity of stuff that I’ve got to do now. I’m already teaching on Monday morning, have a lot of voiceover work to do for eLearning and a rather heavy load of stuff to do for the impending EDM Quality system update. I’ve already had a pile of meetings and it seems like I never left. I can’t believe how busy it is right now for everyone.

One of my favorite things was getting to place new dots on my world map. I have the map hanging on the wall in my office, and each time I go somewhere new for the first time, I add a dot. I got to place 5 on Japan, and have now finally gone to Asia. Of course, now I look at the map and realize that I’ve never been to the southern hemisphere. If Amgen would send me to the Australia office, that would take care of that, otherwise I’m looking at Brazil and East Africa as potential vacation destinations. It’s the problem with travel: once you’ve got it in your blood, there’s no turning back. I find it best summed up in one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere; for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent. — Margot Fonteyn

To tell the truth, I’d already started thinking about my next trip before I even left for Japan. I started thinking about how—now that i’ve gained enough seniority and vacation days at work—I should be able to take two, two-week vacations each year. That’s a pretty lucky place to be in. That means things like “April in Paris, October in Kyoto”; it means one familiar favorite and one new adventure. I’m pretty excited at the prospects, to tell the truth. Add business travel to that, and I should be pretty well setup. Of course it will all cost money too, and that could become problematic…

So another thing I think I need to do is beef up my website. Shortly before my trip, I ran into two problems: first, I bought my new MacBook Pro and due to some unfortunate data transfer accidents, I lost some of my website data. Second, I was planning on doing some reorg and restructuring and took stuff down but then didn’t have time to put it all back up again. I’m especially in need of re-doing my photo albums. I took down all my special interest pages, so now it looks like I never do anything. I’ll start adding stuff, so stay tuned.

Back to my Regularly Scheduled Life…

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Well, I’m back from my 6-week trip to Japan. It’s hard to believe that a) I was actually gone for that long, and b) that it’s all over and I’m home again. Of course, there’s now a ton of stuff I need to do both at home and the office, I still have jet-lag, it’s incredibly hot here right now and I’m suffering from “post-vacation depression”.

I went back to the office yesterday and started trying to get my bearings once again. BTW, I had a total of 367 emails in my mailbox (and Mike Kubit won the pool), so I spent most of the day dealing with that mess. Then trying to catch up on all the happenings in the office and with the projects I’d left behind—everything just moved on without me. I’ll be pretty busy for the next couple of weeks digging out from under.

The depression especially began when I went to lunch at one of my usual spots, California Pizza Kitchen. As I was sitting there eating one of my regular favorites and thinking about my usual office-related concerns, it started feeling almost like my whole Japan experience never happened. That really started to make me sad. I had such a wonderful time and met such wonderful people, that I didn’t really want it to end—thought it would continue on. But then, “regularly-scheduled life” sets in, and all of a sudden, I’m back in my usual rut. So you can see how that might be depressing…

You can, however, look forward to many, many more musings from me here on this blog since I’ve now sort of gotten in the habit. I also want my new Japanese friends to have an easy way of seeing what I’m up to if they’re so inclined. I have a lot of things to say about just how much my Japan trip changed my life and how happy I am that I went.

But in the meantime, I’ve got lots of work to do…

Home again…

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Part of what I forgot to mention about yesterday was that in my searching in Akihabara, I never discovered any big Manga shops. By doing an evening search on the internet, I discovered where to go—but they were closed! So I decided to get up early and take those last few precious hours before leaving to go and check it out.

Arriving more than an hour before they opened, I went back to an already open Yodobashi Camera—where I made the snap decision to buy a new camera! It’s the pocket-sized, latest version of the Sanyo VPC series, and it actually does HD movies—and it was a good deal. Of course, now I need to sell the old one and scrape up some more money to pay it off…

Then the manga shop—Mandarake—then turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, but then I didn’t have a lot of time to check it out thoroughly. It’ll have to be for my next trip…

Then It came time to leave the apartment behind and make my way for the last time to Shinjuku and the Narita Express. That part of the trip was fine and uneventful—but raining, of course, right when I needed to carry all my stuff to the airport. The airport was really nice, since they’ve just re-opened their new facilities after a major renovation. I haven’t been to a more efficiently run airport checkin service since 9/11, and it was refreshing. I made the snap decision to upgrade to Business Class, which I was glad I did (since I had really good food, service and plenty of room with a seat that reclined and had a leg rest—I managed to actually sleep on the plane for a change). Before I’d thought about it, though, I spent some extra money and an extra hour eating lunch at an airport restaurant instead of just making my way directly to the Business Class lounge where I could have snacked for free and had more time to relax and use the wireless internet. Oh well, not for next time…

So then I got home. Dad picked me up at the airport and took me home to an absolutely sweltering Woodland Hills. There has been a record-breaking heat wave here since I left, with only 1 day in the past six weeks where it was below 100 degrees. It was about 106 today, and completely insufferable since I have no air conditioning. That will have to change immediately.

So then—here ends my Japan travel diary. I’m going to switch back to my regular blog and website, where I’ll probably continue to talk about how my visit and study trip to Japan changed me. Check back there over the next little while…

Sayonara…

Last Day in Tokyo

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It’s hard to believe my time here is almost over. I’m at that point where I’m trying to pack in everything I possibly can before the clock runs out, and beginning to have regrets about things I didn’t do and won’t have time for…

Anyway, the first stop was Asakusa to see the famous Kaminarimon Gate to the Senso-ji temple. It was a typically gray morning, threatening rain just to make things perfect. I also ended up doing a lot of souvenir shopping on the market street between the gate and the temple itself. I actually used the fortune sticks at the temple and got one that was really true: “Always traveling around since your childhood has given you a lot of places [sic]…Wherever you go, everything can be done as you wish.” Seems like my life does involve a lot of travel wherefrom I derive my happiest times.

Next stop was the famous (or infamous) Yasukuni Shrine where Japan’s war dead are commemorated. I don’t see what the big deal was—except that supposedly Class A war criminals are also remembered there, but I wouldn’t have known that without the news reports. Most importantly was the museum there, which discussed a lot of Japan’s Military and other history—it was fascinating. My favorite part was watching the little film with actual footage from the Russo-Japanese War.

Then it was off to the Kato Hobby Center Tokyo, which was really cool and much bigger than the Osaka one. They had a ton of operating layouts and I got some good photos for reference on my own layout. I also couldn’t help but succumb and make a couple of additional purchases…

Last stop was Akihabara Electric Town again, which drew me back like some kind of electro magnet (pun intended). I discovered the Yodobashi Camera super store, which is 8 floors of consumer electronics and other goodies—a veritable wonderland for a guy like me. I could easily spend an entire day in here and not see everything. They had a nice hobby section there too—where I ended up buying even more stuff. I ate a really nice Tonkatsu dinner in the 8th floor restaurant area. My niece and nephews would love this place…

And then it was back home to begin packing. Time is too short…

A Long Day…

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The day started off poorly with me wasting a few hours searching in vain for another place to get wireless connectivity for my Mac—I finally gave up and checked emails and such from the ¥200 internet cafe. I also muddled my way through finally finding a ticket counter (at Shinjuku) that sold the full-day JR/Subway passes.

The morning being shot by then, I resolved to stay out as late as I could getting things done. On the list for today: Odaiba and Akihabara. I’d wanted to go out to Odaiba primarily to see the Tokyo Big Sight building because I’d seen it so often in anime like Comic Party. I also knew it was a popular place to hang out with lots of entertaining things to do. That turned out to be true, so I spent a few hours there, had lunch then went to Akihabara in search of anime stuff and electronics.

What a place! It’s almost an overpowering assault on the senses (it probably didn’t help that the first place I ventured into by mistake turned out to be a noisy, smoky pachinko parlor). There was so much going on, and every shop had their touts out front with microphones or bullhorns, shouting for you to come and see what they had. I found a really cool anime and model store—8 floors! There was one floor with nothing but Gundam models and figures—thousands of them. And it was like that with all the other figures and models and series—I was absolutely amazed at the variety. The one thing I did not find was any big manga shops, particularly used manga and doujinshi stores. I think I was in the wrong area, and will try again tomorrow.

Since I’d purchased a separate all-day ticket for the automated train out to Odaiba, I decided to go back there for dinner too and see the city and the Rainbow Bridge all lit up at night. It really was beautiful and also nice and cool out by the water; I can see why it’s a favorite date spot and place to kill time. I ate at a famous Hawaiian hamburger restaurant, of all places. I had the “Set Menu A” which had an avocado burger, fries, salad and drink. They were in “American Sized” portions, too—I think this was the first time I can remember since leaving home when I finally ate enough at one sitting to be full! Of course it cost me around $12.00…

I began wending my way home, stopping off at Shinjuku once again to buy my Narita Airport Express train ticket for Monday—my train leaves at 12:42 PM, and then I’ll be on my way home. I got back to the apartment at around 10:00 PM and took a relaxing bath. I’ve got another big day ahead of me tomorrow—my last full day here—so I need to get to bed!