Our Local Style

It came time that I absolutely needed to have my hair cut. Even so I managed to put it off with an entire month of flimsy excuses: too busy, too tired, too hot, too rainy… And there was also the small problem that we hadn’t covered the “getting a haircut” scenario in class yet. I was deathly afraid that misinterpretation would see me walking out of the barber looking like Lex Luthor.

Feeling a bit braver than usual I cycled to the cheapest barber in the area. Although I call it a barber it’s really something in between a barber and a hair salon: they serve both men and women, and the men’s cuts don’t have to be the typical barber fair. Since “barber” is shorter to type, that’s what I’ll refer to it as.

My normal hair stylist back in Brunei is a whiz with the scissors. He’ll snip, cut and shave so quickly and professionally it’s like watching Iron Chef. In contrast, the Japanese kid who cut my hair probably thought he was Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa because he took pains to do it slowly. When it was over though I had to admit the moral of the Tortoise and the Hare rang true. While he didn’t give me a magazine-style hair cut he managed to compensate for my funny-shaped head. Cut my hair too short in the wrong way and the asymmetry of my noggin becomes very apparent. I don’t know how this kid knew but he managed to cover it up pretty well.

While I was getting my hair cut the mirror reflected the image of a man behind me getting a shave. Getting a shave at the barber’s is perfectly normal except they were shaving his forehead! Do we guys get hairy foreheads?! Dad neglected to mention that!

Fashion senseless

I’m sure my friends were hoping I’d take a cue from the Japanese and change my fashion sense but the truth is there are few here whose style is worth emulating. The university students here dress like students everywhere. Nothing here really demands attention unless it’s a fashion no-no. I once saw a guy in a shirt, tie and waiter-style armless jacket. That wasn’t too bad but he decided to complete the ensamble with tan-coloured slacks rolled up to the knees.

And then there’s that guy who… well I’m pretty he was wearing a skirt! Not a kilt, a skirt! If that’s fashion I’ll have none of it.

As for girls, I don’t care what anime has told you but their sailor-outfit school uniforms are not sexy. That said, the sailor-suit is a fashion unto itself and you can see girls wearing them even on holidays. But what I really find amusing, bordering on disturbing, is the Lolita-styles that some have chosen to adopt. The ones I’ve seen in the city even carry a Victorian umbrella which probably does little to protect them from the Kanazawa rains.

Engrish

If you’ve never visited Engrish.com you are missing out. There’s a lot of Engrish on the clothes here but two particular instances have stood out. The first is a guy who wore a black t-shirt with the following words written in white: Fuck Ken. Either it’s a typo from French Connection or he’s really upset at a guy named Ken.

The second is a girl whose t-shirt had a picture of a big anthropomorphic hamburger on it declaring in big bold words Eat Me! If you didn’t get that then disregard the hamburger and you’re left with a girl wearing a t-shirt that says… Interpret that however you wish.

From what my friends tell meUBD takes attendence at the start of each lecture. Believing themselves to be adults they say the practice is degrading since foreign universities don’t take attendence. Well, they do it here in Kanazawa University too.

University here is really like school all over again. Traditional-style classrooms, where a greater portion of the teaching takes place, outnumber lecture theatres. Walk down the corridors and you’ll see bulletin boards plastered with ads for ECAs and the like.

An hour-long lunch is scheduled for everybody at 12 noon which means lunch hour rush. Canteens have ridiculously long lines of students waiting to get in. Some wait for as long sa 30 minutes! I usually just buy a lunch box set from the student co-op or re-heat some thing from my fridge.

As an interesting aside, in most cases International Students have classes separate from Japanese students.

The summers here in Ishikawa, Kanazawa suck. You’d think that coming from Brunei I’d be used to “hot & humid” but instead I’m tired of having my sweat seal me to my upholstered chair. The Kanazawa spring succeeded in having me acclimatise myself to the chill in the air which has now been cruely witheld.

When the rainy season started I thought it’d be a repreive from the heat. No such luck. For the most part, the rain is more bothersome than anything else. You know that light spray of spit that finds its way out of your conversation partner’s mouth? It’s barely noticable yet truly annoying. Now imagine all the angels in heaven releasing spit-titude at the same time and you have an idea of what the rains are like right now. It will barely drizzle for a brief while, stop, then drizzle again. Some people don’t even bother to open their umbrellas because the rains are so light and sporadic.

By comparison, we had a real downpour this morning though it was still unimpressive by tropical-climate standards. My Japanese friends and teachers thought it was terrible but I couldn’t concur. Any rain where you can still hear yourself think isn’t all that bad.

Now, Kanazawa has a fair number of rivers which reportedly flood during heavy rains. Ironic, isn’t it? I fly hundreds of miles away from Brunei and end up living in Subok! Unlike Brunei however, we’ve got an early-warning system here and they introduced themselves by way of a 6am warning. Although I couldn’t see anything from my vantage point I gathered it was a bunch of guys driving around with a megaphone shouting It’s raining. The rainy season has started. Boy, nothing gets past these guys!

My teacher told me that there are different “danger” levels depending on the severity of the floods. I’ll start worrying when we reach DEFCON 4. Or should that be Depth Con 4?

For those interested I’ve taken over Reeda’s responsibility of blogging for CNET Asia: presenting Derived Regulation!

This probably means all ICT related topics will be posted there from now on. You lot are going to have to make do with my fun little observations within the Land of the Rising Sun.

Three characters cumulatively possess the hearts, minds and souls of the Japanese public. The first is fairly obvious and really should be addressed as a Heavenly Queen. It’s Hello Kitty, of course. She must be the Japanese avatar of the perfect female: cute, innocent and no mouth to talk back with. You’ve all seen the pictures online somewhere so I need not elaborate. She is everywhere.

The second Heavenly King does not have the same reach as Hello Kitty but his presence is still quite palpable. Like Hello Kitty, Heavenly King #2 is also a cat. You thought right if you guessed Doraemon, the robot cat from the future. Why cats are so popular here is beyond me but it may have something to do with the Beckoning Cat.

So that’s two cats and… a dog I suppose. Well, that’s what the third Heavenly King has been described as. And he’s surprisingly not of Japanese origin either: Stitch from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. Other Disney characters, in particular a certain Pooh Bear, are also common-place in the childrens’ department but none hold a candle to Stitch: I’ve seen an entire UFO Catcher stocked with nothing but Stitch caps! Experiment 626’s popularity here is probably what led Disney to re-imagine the movie in a Japanese setting.

The Brunei halal brand has to be branded and it has to be able to explain to people why (Brunei) is better as a centre for excellence than somewhere like Malaysia or Singapore.

We’re boned.

How come no one told me the Scatman died nearly 10 years ago? It’s probably for the best considering how scat now means something else entirely.

Congratulations to my sister who gave birth to her first son at 5:20am! Way to make me feel old, sis.

I finally made it out to the movies here in Kanazawa! The weekend price was ¥1,400 (SGD$17.00) with a generous ¥200 discount for being a student. How do these people stay in business?

Since Iron Man won’t be released here until September I went to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to tide me over. While most foreign movies here are dubbed in Japanese they do reserve a few screens for airing the movie with its original English dialogue complete with Japanese subtitles.

I found the movie slightly disappointing though I’m not entirely sure why. Either Lucas, Spielberg & Co. forgot what made the original trilogy such a fun ride (who can blame them? It’s been nearly 20 years since we saw Dr. Jones on the screen!) or times have changed so much that Indy, sadly, may not cut it anymore. The dismal Tomb Raider movies made me pine for the original whip-cracking spelunker and I really wanted to enjoy this movie more than I did but I keep coming back to the realisation that the parts of me that liked the movie also happen to revel in the nostalgic.

The movie isn’t bad but at the same time there is nothing particularly noteworthy here either. Nothing in this movie came close to capturing the same awe and excitement that rolled forth as (heh heh) Indy ran from a giant boulder in Temple of Doom. And the irony from that same movie when Indy was jumping about, with his shoes literally smoking, yelling for water and seeing a torrential flood heading for him is completely missing from Temple of the Crystal Skull.

I re-watched the original trilogy less than a year back when it played on Astro and the adventure was as fresh as the day the movies were first released. Perhaps it’s time we retired Indiana Jones. Let’s wrap him up and vacuum-seal him in a transparent box for future generations to see and adore. Let’s set him upon a golden-encrusted pedastal as a tribute not to an action hero — those guys are a dime a dozen — but to he who is perhaps the last adventure hero. You can bet they’re going to try and re-invigorate the franchise with another character, this movie certainly dropped enough hints towards Shia LaBeouf’s possible donning of the legendary fedora, but let us not forget there can only be one Indiana Jones.

For the forseeable future I am a survey pusher. This means I will stop you in public, shove a survey sheet in your direction and demand 5 minutes of your life (uncompensated) so that I can analyze some larger societal inclination.

The only rung lower is telemarketer; I’m testing the waters as we speak.

Earlier this week I gave a presentation (in pre-programmed Japanese) on “My Country”. Considering that most people have next to no knowledge of Brunei it wasn’t too difficult to wow the crowd. Ha! Take that, Steve Jobs! Our next presentation is supposed to have a little more value to it: we come up with a hypothesis and test it in the open field. It doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly unique — a previous student looked into how much people spent on make-up monthly and found a corelation between higher expenditure and those who go clubbing more. The idea is that we get used to preparing, conducting and analyzing such surveys in Japanese.

I started off feeling very apprehensive about distributing my survey in public, not to mention a little nervous. Strangely enough though the more I handed out the more fun it became. It was like getting a high score in a video game, very addictive. But I still felt dirty inside. I’m going to take my fifth shower of the day now and try to scrub the scum off my soul.