I am apparently some kind of total chode and managed to write an entire post last night, then forget to update it as the index page. As a result, today is a very exciting double feature. Yesterday's has some excellent Engrish, so I wouldn't miss it.
I did hardly anything again today, although I did manage to get a third of the way through "The Bells of Nagasaki" at last. I've been reading this book in an extremely nominal sense for about two weeks now, and this is all the farther I've gotten, which is pretty pathetic. All in all, it's just not a particularly interesting book, so it's not been giving me enough motivation to keep at it when I would so much rather be doing something else, like staring at a wall or counting the wrinkles on my left pinky toe. So far it's just a bunch of accounts of people experiencing the bomb, and while each one has some value in its own special way, just like every little flower in God's garden, for the most part once you've read one first-hand account of a bombing, you've read them all. The only reasons I'm sticking with it are a vague sense of obligation to at least pretend to be interested in the fact that Hiroshima wasn't the only city hit by an atomic bomb, and the fact that it's only like 160 pages long.
There is this new entertainment center that opened up when the relatives were here that is like the black pit of doom for money; it has whole floors, carefully note the plural, of awesome video games that pretty well beg you in very formal Japanese to play them, and you know how hard it is to resist courtesy. Actually that's a lie; I just play them because I like to shoot things, and most of the games allow you to do so in ways that haven't even been conceived in America. The trouble is, any machine involving change here starts at 100 yen, so I find myself popping in 100 and 200 yen for a single game, when in America I refuse to play a game if it costs more than a quarter. It's basically like living a 15-minute walk from GameWorks, if GameWorks also had karaoke, pool, bowling and sticker pictures. Again, I don't quite understand what something this enjoyable is doing without federal regulation, but with any luck some civil-minded interest group will take back downtown Hiroshima For The Children.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
