But anyway. Yesterday I woke up the morning of my Chinese oral exam — which I hadn’t studied properly for but managed to fluke because the content of my speech combined three of my favourite topics: Mandarin, shopping and Shanghai — and my Japanese FINAL EXAM (no exaggeration), thinking I’d be sitting said exams in some dingy lecture theatre on the other side of the campus from my tram stop. Well, I was wrong on both counts. I did my Chinese oral exam in the course coordinator’s office, and the Japanese exam in this building ↓

Look familiar? Well, it’s the Melbourne Exhibition Building, straddling the edge of the Cartlton Gardens and Melbourne Museum, and a venue I had always associated with exhibitions of middle aged women’s quilts, not university student exams. Not only that, it’s not even on Melbourne University’s campus. I can only imagine how much of our fees went into renting this thing for 2 and a half hours. Though I have to admit, I’ve never sat such a…picturesque (?) exam before.

I had to leave the exam early in order to take this photo, so I hope you appreciate it! (Actually, I was more motivated by a bladder dangerously close to bursting, but that shouldn’t lessen your appreciation). And I did finish the exam, technically, though I cringe to think how many silly errors will drag my final mark down, which will then be subject to another abominable round of scaling. I hate mark scaling. Unless it’s in my favour, in which case I only hate it on vague principle, har har.

But I was in a pretty good mood when I got home and I got to cut into an enormous pumpkin with a carving knife while making dinner, so all around it was a pretty successful day. And no, I don’t expect anyone to understand that logic. Put it down to a brain addled by taking exams in three different languages, which henceforth will by my official excuse for any mistakes I make, from forgetting to take in the laundry to inadvertently setting my exam venues on fire.

Sailing Towards Enemy Ships

One-handedly Fending off Falling Barrel While Locked in Deadly Combat

Going to the Seashore

Checking out Funky Aphrodisiac

Doin’ the Horizontal Tango

Watching (blind) Lover Engaged in Mortal Combat with Mutinous Sailor

Announces He’s Been Doing the Pirate Princess’ Fiancé

Receiving Ransom Note for Captured Pirate Princess

Discovers that the Man who has Captured the Princess is his Lover’s Older Brother, Who also Poisoned Him as a Child and was Responsible for him Becoming an Occultist Assassin

Discovers that his Lover Murdered the Former Attorney General While still Employed as Occultist Assassin

Standing by as Lover Gets it on with said Attorney General Whom He was Supposed to have Assassinated but Actually Only Stabbed a Bit

You see, life isn’t easy for poor Ayace — what with a confusing love life and all the glowering, sword-swinging, brooding, glowering, and glowering. I therefore propose that we start a special fund to buy a new facial expression for him. Even something along the lines of “impassive” would do a world of good. Donate now!

Silences in everyday Japanese conversation

That’s right, not the content of people’s conversation, but the gaps in between. This includes timing silences between interlocutors down to milliseconds. When used to draw conclusions about styles of conversation preferred by people of different backgrounds it becomes more interesting, but on an abstract level…?

*meaningful silence*

Distraction

Yep, one of our Media and Communications guest lecturers is writing a book about being distracted. I know how he feels — just don’t expect to see this treatise finished anytime soon.

But despite being surrounded by such scintillating ephemera, I shall not be distracted from researching Sarah Palin newspaper articles for my News Story Analysis. No, there shall be no distraction or procrastination. None at all. Not one skerrick. Not a smidgeon, bit or bob. Hm.

Anyway, stay tuned to this RSS feed for future updates on the wonders of gay pirate manga, the philosophical marvels that can be found on the outside of spring water bottles, and a long rant about the only three ESL students who turned up for my class yesterday, who (it turns out) do not find prepositions and cloze gap activities nearly as exciting as I do.

And then there’s my ESL class. After my first lesson with them four weeks ago and the possibly-related loss of my voice, I have been trying to devise time wasting activities that involve the students writing for extended periods of time while I silently roam as much of the classroom as the two rows of tables allow, happily eavesdropping on their hushed conversations in Chinese. Last week I was particularly lazy and photocopied an article out of my Year 12 Mandarin textbook, attached a set of comprehension questions, and asked them to translate it all into English.

***

*Five minutes into class, unfamiliar student approaches the whiteboard, holding out Mandarin article*

Unfamiliar student: “Excuse me, miss?”

V: “Yes?”

Unfamiliar student: “Um, this is in Chinese.”

V: “Yes.”

Unfamiliar student: “Um, I’m Korean.”

*V narrowly avoids slapping her forehead as she realises Unfamiliar Student is in fact the sole non-Chinese member of her class, the one who hadn’t turned up for the last four weeks and had been considered, for all intents and purposes, lost at sea*

V: *rummages in her bag and hastily extracts the first thing she finds in English, which is an article about early 20th Century Japanese occupation of Taiwan* “OK, how about I give you this page and you cirlce all the adjectives, verbs and proper nouns. Don’t worry about what it means, just concentrate on the word classification. OK?”

Now-familiar Korean student: *looks at offered sheet, looks at the floor, glances at the teacher whose face appears to be spasming under the pressure of trying to alternately express encouragement and horror* “Um, I think I’ll just do the Chinese work.”

Of course you will.

Kinokuniya (Shinjuku Main Store)

Shinjuku, 3-17-7, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo-to

What can I say? I love Kinokuniya, the famous Japanese bookstore chain that has managed to somehow make Sydney worthwhile visiting (as they have the only Kinokuniya in Australia, grr). I’m also very fond of the Taiwanese stores in the Breeze Centre (Taipei) and Hanshin Department Store (Kaohsiung, near the arena). I only managed to visit one Kinokuniya in Japan, but that was enough. 8 floors, a large English section including a good selection of Japanese as a second language books and two shelves of English-language manga (US prices, unfortunately), with the ground floor devoted to all things manga and anime. I was a bit too overcome with glee to check out the DVDs, but I had a good prowl through the enormous selection of manga catering to all genres and tastes, from shonen to shounen-ai, hentai to yuri and goodness knows how many other demarcations I managed to miss (and misread).

Bookoff

Shinjuku-Nishi

I passed this bookstore several times before I noticed the enormous shelves of manga within and later realised it was part of the second-hand bookstore chain called Bookoff (though they also sell DVDs, CDs and games). Unlike new manga none of their stock was wrapped in plastic, hence the ever-crowded aisles of old and young comic fans alike, reading after a tiring day at school and the office. Most of the manga I looked through was in excellent condition and ranging from about ¥100 to ¥350, which was definitely easier on the wallet than Kinokuniya. Here I bought several random BL manga and the first four volumes of Kuroshitsuji (黒執事). (Again).

Mandarake

Shibuya

I’ve already written quite a lot about my first trip to Mandarake’s Shibuya store, but that post was focusing on their huge array of doujinshi, when they also have an enormous collection of manga, CDs, DVDs, art books and other anime memorabilia (though they really specialise in yaoi and hentai). Their website describes coming into Mandarake as “treasure hunting”, and it really is like that. I could have spent hours going through their maze of stacks looking for rare gems and popular series alike, and probably would have if my time in Japan hadn’t been so short, and the things to see so vast. Definitely worth another visit.

Did somebody say "doujinshi"? Just one set of shelves at Mandarake.

Unlike other parts of Asia I’ve visited, Japan has a thriving zine culture in the form of “doujinshi” (lit. same person magazine, as in “zines written by and for people with the same interests”). Like zines, doujinshi can be virtually any kind of self-published booklet or book containing original material and/or a synthesis or expansion of other peoples’ work (e.g. fanfiction and fan art). Doujinshi containing short stories or manga (Japanese comics) using the characters of other popular manga, anime, video games and celebrities are the most common types of doujinshi you’ll see lining the shelves of bookstore-distros, though unknown and already popular artists and writers also use the unconstrained nature of self-publishing to create entirely original doujinshi. To avoid prosecution for using copyrighted characters and other material in their work, Japanese zinesters and groups of co-authors known as “circles” generally keep print runs low, which in turn can make prices for rare doujinshi extremely high if you’re lucky enough to find them at all.

Japan’s twice-yearly Comiket (aka “comic market”, arguably the largest zine/doujinshi event and exchange in the world) had ended a month before I arrived in Tokyo for my four day visit, so I did the next best thing and headed to Mandarake, a Japanese pop culture fan’s paradise store, selling manga, anime, collectables, CDs and, vitally, a huge array of doujinshi. This was the first time I’d seen real Japanese doujinshi in person, so after kind of dying of joy, I began scouring the shelves for anything I
recognised.

The first thing I noticed about Japanese zines was the binding (go figure). Virtually every doujinshi I picked up was perfect bound — not a staple or wonky page in sight. I already knew professional printing was cheap in Asia, but this was ridiculous. The quality of most of the art was also incredible, whether it was stylised versions of popular characters, or artwork so well emulated I began to wonder if this “fan art” wasn’t the work of the original artist after all (which does happen too). Almost immediately I began to understand the allure of collecting doujinshi, particularly if it’s re-imagining and re-interpreting your favourite fandoms, and clearly the other customers in Mandarake (90% of whom seemed to be female, though that’s not surprising considering how much yaoi they stock) had long since passed the “stunned” stage into buy mode. I saw at least half a dozen customers come in, pick up one of the shopping baskets stacked by the door and move progressively through the store’s labyrinthine shelves until their basket was full of doujinshi.

It looked like classic retail therapy to me, so I thought I’d give it a go. Unfortunately my Japanese is practically non-existent and having to pull out every doujinshi to see what it was because I couldn’t read any of the shelf labels started to become tedious (also the non-zine-interested person I was travelling with was starting to throw me dirty looks). So eventually I settled on the few shelves whose labelling I could read either because the name of the original franchise was in English (e.g. Death Note) or because the Japanese name was the same as the Chinese name (e.g. 黑執事). The next problem was that all of the doujinshi were packaged in plastic, and so the merits of any given doujinshi had to be assessed by its price (the cheapest I bought was¥140 (AU$1.70), the most expensive ¥1200 (AU$15)), the quality of the art on the front cover and any other peripherals like a list of contributing artists and R18+ labels. Unfortunately all of these competing factors became too much for my addled brain and the five doujinshi I wound up buying were not what I was expecting: one turned out to be a short story when I thought it was a comic, and the other four contained certain images of much-loved characters doing things I’ve since attempted to expunge from my memory.

All in all though it was fantastic being in Japan and seeing how they contribute to local and global zine culture, and I can’t wait to go back and do it all again (this time with a shopping basket).