Adventure Time - Jake is ready for his c

[STICKY] Friends Only - Welcome!

Older posts will remain public, but new posts will be friends only. As someone who frequently browses random journals looking for new people to friend, I know how frustrating it is not to get a peek. Hopefully this little intro post will help you decide whether to stay or move on.



WHO/WHAT/WHERE
Tove, known to some as tofu. Bisexual. Girl. In her thirties. Grew up in a small town outside of Oslo, Norway. Studied Japanese and linguistics at the University of Oslo, currently living in Tokyo, Japan with her husband.

I do translation work for a living and drink way too much coffee. I have an annual passport for the Tokyo Disney parks and spend a lot of time there.

I'm into absurdist comedy and foodie adventures. I love Tokyo, and feel extremely lucky to be able to call it home. I hope I'm able to express this appreciation and share all the things that make this city so special to me through my posts.



JOURNAL STYLE
Daily life babbles, observations, thoughts. Nostalgic flashbacks. Some commentary on current events. Photography. Posts about hobbies, including Disney parks, journaling, movies, and video games.

I'm pretty chill, I write first and foremost to entertain myself. I tend to think of LJ as YouTube for people who don't want to be on camera.

FRIENDING POLICIES
None. Leave a comment, and I'll friend you right back!

Please note that I unfriend without notice if it's obvious that we have nothing in common. I also don't expect or need an explanation if you want to unfriend me. If you feel like unfriending me, go ahead.

Got any questions? Leave a comment! Feel free to treat this post as an AMA.
Adventure Time - Jake is ready for his c

Disney Blog Update

So my mom is currently on a surprise visit. It really caught me by surprise. Thankfully, she brought along a friend, and they seem to want to spend time by themselves exploring the city (though neither of them speak Japanese, or indeed, any English, hahah!). They're staying at a hotel about 30 minutes away from my place. It gives me time to destress and relax, which is good.

My mom really wanted to go to Disney with me, so that was first on their to do list! Everything worked out pretty well in the end, but I was struggling at times. I don't think they noticed. My mom enjoyed herself, and that, to me, was the most important thing.

Anyway, I wrote a trip report of sorts for my Disney Blog. It now has a BETA comment feature. You can sign your comment with your twitter handle by entering an "@" and then your twitter username in the "Name" field. Don't have a twitter? Just enter any nickname (without the "@")!

Read the trip report here.

I hope everyone's having a good Easter!
Adventure Time - Jake is ready for his c

節分の日

I'll just jump right in here and pretend I didn't disappear off the face of the earth for a month.

Today was 節分の日, setsubun, the day before the beginning of spring, apparently! I've never experienced this before, and didn't really know anything about it until a couple of days ago. There are still many mysteries surrounding this tradition, but I felt I had a good go at trying to learn more about it.

Setsubun is also known as "bean throwing festival". Because... you throw beans. To prevent evil demons from entering your house. Demons hate beans. Duly noted.

You shout 鬼は外、福は内！ (out with evil, in with fortune!) while throwing the beans. This is good fun, this chant alone is enough to make this one of my favourite traditions of all time.

Apparently it's thought to be good luck if you eat the same number of beans as your age. I ate exactly 0 beans today, so I didn't do too well with this.

I did, however, go to Kanda Myojin to take a look at the setsubun ceremony taking place at the shrine. It was all fairly confusing, but a procession of people, lead on by people representing the different kami enshrined at Kanda Myojin, entered the shrine. Everyone said a prayer together, and then released confetti from giant gold balls hanging from the roof of the shrine. The procession then split up into groups, and they took turns walking on to a balcony overlooking the crowd. Where they stopped to throw out bags of beans. Also mikan, and possibly candy. I didn't get to the front, but I almost got hit in the head by a mikan, so I know for sure they were throwing those.

It was so much fun, the crowd went wild. I spent a little over an hour at the shrine just watching this event taking place. Hopefully next year I can be in front, bag ready to catch all the fortunes.

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Tomorrow is the first day of spring! Time truly flies.
Adventure Time - Jake is ready for his c

2016

People keep bitching about what a terrible year 2016 has been, and it annoys me. 2016 has been an amazing year for me personally. It's been challenging, fun, memorable, and an absolute adventure.

If 2015 was the year I made things happen, then 2016 was the year I let things happen. I learnt to take control, and now I'm learning to let go and go with the flow - in a healthy way.

I moved to Japan
I kept my freelance business going
I got an annual passport for Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea
I went apartment hunting and ended up buying a house
I signed up for and sat the JLPT (N2)
I'm slowly learning to live by myself
I've taken lots of pictures
I have met a lot of new people
I have plans for fun projects for 2017

My future is still a little up in the air. I have an appointment with an immigration lawyer in January. I have a work contract, so I should be able to stay in Japan for at least another year, but hopefully longer. I'll know more next year!

Happy New Year! Thank you all for sticking with me even though I've mostly been MIA this year. I hope we can all keep in touch in 2017 too.

I'll end this final post of 2016 with a collection of my favourite pictures from 2016. It's been an eventful year. One for the books. Definitely one I'll remember for ever.

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Jul med din glede

メリー・クリスマス！

Christian and I have had an amazing week, and we're now ending it on a high note with a traditional Japanese Christmas Eve. We've done the works, I'm even wearing a santa outfit!



In Japan, people have KFC for Christmas dinner. I'm not 100% sure how this became a thing, but it's huge. There's a KFC in the food court of our local department store. They gave us a pickup slip for our order, we had to wait two hours to come back and pick up our food! I'm glad we decided to go out and get dinner a little earlier than originally planned. At least we didn't have to wait two hours in line outside the KFC, that would have been a downer. Instead we explored the department store and took in the madness of Christmas Eve shopping. I loved every second of it.

We took the food home, and had dinner while watching Christmas films.

We also had Christmas Cake, another Japanese tradition. Typically a fancy strawberry shortcake with plenty of cream. The red and white supposedly symbolises the Japanese flag.

I picked this up a couple of days ago, I was worried they'd sell out (and indeed, the store I got it from was all sold out of cakes today!)



I got a pocket operator for Christmas! It's a little synth with bass noises. Christian had one of these things allready and wanted to collect them all, so we gifted each other the missing pieces.

Merry Christmas!
Tim Roth - Camera, Camera

Boiler陸亀

I think I'm soon done with posting about events that have passed. I think it'll be good to finally catch up with myself.

Saturday December 3rd I went and saw Boiler陸亀 live in Shibuya. This is an indies band that's been on my radar since summer 2014, when I picked up their mini-album after talking to them at an event. I was at the event to see Gacharic Spin, but walked away more excited about Boiler陸亀 than the Gachapin show. I didn't even see Boiler陸亀 live at that time. They were manning their merch booth outside the venue and managed to talk me into buying their CD and a phone strap mascot thing.

When I came home from Japan that summer, I listened to their music a lot. Their music is a sort of absurdist rock/punk/funk/ska. It can make you laugh one second and cry the next, the vocalist packs a lot of punch and emotion. Her voice is really what first caught my attention, and the reason I kept going back to their music.

My dad passed away August 2014. I listened to Boiler陸亀 on my way to the hospital to say my goodbyes. Their music kept me going that day.

Fast-forward to early summer 2016, I hear news that Boiler陸亀 is releasing a full album, and that it will be available at Tower Records. I bought it as soon as I could, but couldn't bring myself to listen to it. In fact, I hadn't listened to any of their music since the day my dad died. I wanted to, but I was worried it would stir up things I hadn't dealt with.

A few months passed before I was able to sit down and listen to the new album. It felt good. I felt like I could properly close a chapter and start a new one. I started listening to their old mini-album again. Then they announced a solo show in Shibuya. It would be their very first solo show in Tokyo, I bought tickets as fast as I could.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The show was at Shibuya O-crest, which turned out to be a tiny venue on the fifth floor (no elevator!!!) of a huge building in the shady love hotel district of Shibuya ......

I was prepared to maybe be the only foreigner in the audience (I wasn't), but I wasn't prepared to be one of only a few audience members. When I walked in 15 minutes before stated show start, there were only about 20 people there. This was a tiny venue, but 20 people wasn't enough to fill even two rows in front of the stage. I felt a little uneasy. 20-30 more people showed up before the show started. I figured I should move closer to the stage to look more involved, but then the people in front of me started doing warm-up exercises.... warm-up exercises???????

And sure enough, as soon as the band started playing, the people in front of me created a mosh pit and started moshing like crazy. It caught me completely off guard. Boiler陸亀's music never struck me as the kind of music you mosh to, but Japanese live audiences have surprised me in the past, so I should have seen this coming, tbh.

I got a nice hard kick in the knee before I took a good step back and hung out in the back next to other head bobbing audience members.



The show was absolutely amazing.

The vocalist went a little off-key a couple of places, but their performance was so passionate and energetic, it was easily forgiven. They did a lot of talking between songs, it was very intimate and relaxed. They were funny and adorable. They performed 12円. I cried. And nearly got hit in the head by a guy who decided to stage dive (luckily other people actually paid attention to the audience and dove in front of me to catch him).

I tried to join in on the dancing during 臀部で候, but had to give up, because despite having had hit practice at roller derby, I'm not ready for moshing.

They had special guests, I looked them up afterwards, and ONE OF THEM IS AN AV ACTOR...??? I'm so confused, though this explains why he was on stage in a red little number (and... didn't do any singing).



anko_kun, didn't you say you thought he looked familiar? Aaaahahahahhaha.

I had a bit of an existential crisis when leaving the venue. The band was standing right by the exit, and I was too nervous to talk to them. It felt rude passing by them without saying anything, but I was panicking and couldn't think of anything. I hung around for a little while (secretly hoping they'd go somewhere else), but ended up running past them when a couple of other people went over to talk to them.



The band posted this on their twitter after the gig. Can you spot me in the audience picture? Hahaha.


12円 is still my favourite song of theirs. The emotion is universal, you don't have to understand the lyrics to feel it.


I am looking forward to following this band, hopefully I'll get to see them live again soon.
Adventure Time - Jake is ready for his c

Moshi Moshi Nippon Festival

A couple of weeks ago a sponsored tweet (of all things) alerted me of a big music festival/convention happening in Tokyo that was also somehow completely free for foreigners to attend.

I forgot all about it until someone else on my TL also started talking about it. I registered for my free tickets, and decided to go check it out on the last day of the festival.

It was... weird. I mean, the festival itself was good, but it felt really out of place in Japan. It's a festival that promotes Japanese culture and artists... so all the stands were targeting foreigners. There were also plenty of Japanese guests attending, but they had to pay ‎¥‎3000 to be there! It just made me feel really weird. The venue was made up to look like a bon odori stage, there were traditional Japanese music (performed with taiko drums and shamisen) interrupted by DJ sets and energetic dance shows before the main stage show started.

There were plenty of booths and things to experience, but being on my own, it felt a little awkward. I was only there for the music anyway, I didn't realise it would also have a whole event space.


The bon odori stage area


Kyary Pamyu Pamyu VR experience (yes, really, I didn't bother getting in line for it).

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Spock

Nerd Nite Tokyo

My backlog of things to write about is getting severe. I can't remember the last time my life was this busy and filled with so many good things!

I've never really been the kind of person to attend events, but now that I've thrown myself out into the meetup world and made some friends doing so, I figured I'd go try this one event I'd been hearing about through @beingtokyo.

The event is called Nerd Nite Tokyo, it's apparently a local branch of a bigger thing, though I had never heard about it before. It's a monthly event where (usually) three presenters get to talk nerdy for about 20 minutes or so on a topic of their choosing.

The event I attended had the following schedule:
Ken Kaba — Just the Worst: Why Do We Love Bad Movies?
Danielle DeLatte — Emerging Space Businesses
Tomasz Rutkowski — Decoding the Mind in Realtime

I saw the two first presentations, but had to leave before the last one because I was worried I'd miss my last train .... the event was about 45 minutes by train away from my place, I didn't know how long each presentation would be or that there would be breaks in-between. It started at 8PM, so this already seemed a little late for me considering the travel time to get back home.

The venue was a British pub in Shimokitazawa (they even served fish&chips!), even before entering the door, it was clear that this was an international event, meaning... few or no Japanese people present. Absolutely everything was in English.



On the one hand it's great to "escape" once in a while to spend time with fellow expats, but on the other hand, it's so easy to slip into a habit of only going to these type of events and only ever befriending other expats. There's nothing wrong with that, I guess, but you hear stories of people who move to Tokyo and never even bother learning basic Japanese for every day life, because they get by just fine in their own English speaking bubble... and that irks me quite a bit. I'm not saying that this applies to any of the people at this event, I just feel wary of these type of events for this reason.

In any case, I met up with my translator friend and her husband, we found us a nice back row seat, and ended up in this official picture from the event (can you spot us? We're blurry)!



This must have been taken during the first talk, which was very entertaining! Though the title was a little misleading. Or he just never got around to talking about the why. He basically presented a bunch of hilarious clips from obscure films, and talked about his own criteria for a "bad" film that's also good (for all the wrong reasons).
One of the clips he screened was a long sequence from Deadfall, a Nicolas Cage film I'd never heard about before, but that I definitely want to track down now. Holy hell, what a mess.

Unfortunately, this was the only presenter without a twitter. He seemed like the kind of guy who could have recommended cinemas or other film related events in the city....

When the second presenter started talking, it got very technical very fast, and though learning about space mining is very interesting, it's not really a burning passion of mine. Nor was it that entertaining, so the setting seemed really off for this type of presentation.

I was worried I'd feel this way about the event beforehand, but the first talk was really entertaining, so that made me hopeful about the rest living up to the standards he set.

It was a fun enough night out, but I had pictured it as something a little different. Maybe I've just become too accustomed to No Such Thing As The News and their highly entertaining way of presenting weird facts and nerdy trivia.

I'll keep my eye on Nerd Nite's schedule, if something interesting pops up, I'll drop by again! This time was a bit of a miss, I guess, but it has inspired me to go hunt down more trashy/obscure films, so that's something!