アンパンマン (Anpanman) and 携帯電話 (cell phones)

My host family has a little girl who loves Anpanman. I still don't know what that name means or why she loves it, but one weekend I wanted to get a cell phone so I agreed to go along to the Anpanman show they got tickets to on the way to the cell phone store. I remember as a kid there was a puppet show that would visit my elementary school and teach us about friendship and imagination and how to get a gymnasium full of small children to sit down and stop whining for a while, but it was nothing like this. Here's what my youth looked like:

Here's what Japanese children get:

Actually, the show I went to was slightly different.

Look at these adorable costumes. Look. At. Them. The narrator is on the far left, Baikinman is the dark-colored one, and to his right (in the cape) is Anpanman. They're all food-related I think. Whatever. It's a kid's show.

It was about ばいきんマン (Baikinman) being a jerk the whole time and everyone else putting up with him because they're all friends and アンパンマン (Anpanman) is the best. I really don't know what was happening so that's my best guess. No love for Baikinman.

One of the things I could understand was that they taught kids to look both ways before crossing the street and they actually had the kids stand up and yell at Anpanman at one point to give him strength so he could defend himself against Baikinman. Come on, Baikinman. Get it together.

Seriously, Baikinman, what's wrong with you?

And then at the end all of the kids lined up to shake the characters' hands. I mean, it's a cartoon so I guess the kids watch it every day and they grow to love the characters, but man. I was surprised. The kids were super attentive. They were also younger than five years old so maybe all the bright colors and excited voices were more than enough to keep them engaged. I was also the only foreigner there, too, so I was really glad I was there with a parent so it looked like I was maybe helping her babysit rather than just being a random Westerner with a weird taste in animation. Who am I kidding, we're all random Westerners with a weird taste in something.

Afterwards we tried some free samples of food that were outside and had the girl "win" some food through rock-paper-scissors (the mom whispered to the employee that the girl only played paper and we paid for it anyway). I mean, I bet I would've had lots of fun if I were that age. It was at least interesting to see. I might actually start watching the show since it's basically at the level of Japanese I can understand (if not higher).

So then we drove over to the nearest mall, where we had wandered around a bit before we went to the show (and where we only found one store with a Japanese name between places like Ralph Lauren and Nike) and stepped into the Softbank store. Softbank is one of the cell phone companies here and they did a presentation at my school so I already knew their prices and that they had prepaid phones for people like me who wouldn't stay in the country more than a year. When we got there, though, we had the employee call at least four other stores, and none of them had the prepaid phones in stock. The store closest to my school did, however, which was a d'uh moment for me, although I was trying to avoid going there because the line seemed so long at the beginning of the semester.

The only problem with Japanese cell phones, at least the one I have, is that, even though you can change the settings to English, when you type there is no "space" key so you have to dig through a list of punctuation marks every time you write a sentence. That's all the more reason to default to Japanese, but I figured out how to switch between languages while typing rather than changing the phone's language settings every time I want to use both Japanese and English. Yeah, I'm supposed to be using Japanese as much as possible, but with the vocabulary and knowledge of grammar that I have at the moment it's not exactly fluid. I might've told some people before I left that I was "conversational". That was a lie. Actually, sometimes I'm not even conversational in English. Life is hard.

So I don't end on a sour note I'm just going to add a view of my walk to campus. It was cloudy when I went today, but somehow the mountains always look so green and fresh to me. Then there's a river I walk along which I want to study by one day because even though it's near the train station and cars always pass by and other students chat with their friends on their way to school, the sound of water is so soothing and it looks so clean I feel like I could dip my feet in there on a really hot day and read a book for a few hours. Near where I live in the U.S. there's a river I can walk to but I wouldn't necessarily want to stick any part of my body in there.

You guys, I love mountains. I don't think these are even tall enough to be mountains but I love them.

The only problem here would be mosquitoes, which don't seem to bite me as much as they did back home (maybe there are less of them here?) but somehow they always go for the strangest, least expected places. My friend was bitten under her toe. I always get them between my knuckles and, even worse, under my knee. My mom once told me that hand sanitizer takes the itch away so I've been carrying a travel-size bottle around religiously. It really works! Thanks, Mom!