Time slips by

It's looking like the end of week 2. Wow, how did that happen?

This week was spent traveling with my class. We met everyday for something or another.

On Monday we went to the publishing company of Shonen Magazine, the second most popular manga weekly in Japan. We all learned as to how intense the process of making a weekly manga magazine is. Sometimes the artist and editors go back and forth for 30 hours straight just during the planning stages.

Tuesday we went to the Edo period museum and Asakusa. The museum was nice, but I still hate Asakusa. Tourist traps left and right.

Wednesday was just class. Way to go Wednesday!

Thursday we went on a tour of the imperial palace. I was happy to do this because it was something I failed to do last time. It turned out to be a mistake. It was extremely hot that day and standing around exposed to the sun was not really a priority. The palace itself was pretty awesome, but the tour was way too long for the extremely small distance we covered. I chilled out afterward by going to the Sony Building.

Highlight of the week was the concert at Club Quattro on Thursday. I saw Ogre You Asshole and Eastern Youth. They were both pretty fantastic. I didn't really know how big a deal Eastern Youth was before the concert, but the crowd was flipping out. They seemed really Fugazi influenced (even had a bell above the ride cymbal). I am definitely missing out by not knowing the lyrics. OYA was great live. Their drummer is unbelievable. He was consistently using rudiments and one handed rolls, and was just so fluid overall.

Friday was spent at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. The museum there depicted WWII as a defensive war for Japan, brought on by America pressuring Japan with cutting off our exports to them. Not once was the alliance with the Axis mentioned, nor Nanking, nor anything else one would think would be a slightly important historical detail that might portray Japan in any sort of negative light. Yeah.

Later in Akihabara, I discovered a shop completely devoted to selling sd cards to hack a Nintendo DS so you can put music and however many games you want on it at the same time....