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Japanese

Kendo and Ramen

Today I went down to Lit­tle Tokyo to grab some ramen for lunch, and hap­pened upon the Cherry Blos­som Fes­ti­val. I only stayed a lit­tle while, to see some sumo and kendo per­for­mances.

I got there late for the sumo un­for­tu­nately, but I did get to see a few matches where Dan Kalbfleisch wiped the floor with some other guys.

The kendo demon­stra­tion started with sen­sei Cary Yoshio Mi­zobe per­form­ing tameshi­giri—cut­ting a tatami omote with a katana. His stu­dents went on from there to show off their moves with shi­nai. Sen­sei Mi­zobe was ex­plain­ing one of the moves: tsuki, a stab to the throat ap­par­ently dif­fi­cult enough that he only lets his black belt stu­dents per­form it, to lessen the risk of not hav­ing enough pre­ci­sion and in­jur­ing the op­po­nents. He said he was hired to train Brit­tany Mur­phy to per­form it for her new movie, The Ramen Girl. The only prob­lem is, they wanted him to train her on this ad­vanced move in eight hours. His only ad­vice was to to­tally fake it out with cam­era tricks, or risk in­jury. Thought that was funny :)

CN 2009 recap

This year’s NSU Cul­ture Night was in­cred­i­ble!

Open­ing up was Kyodo Taiko, per­form­ing their Swing and Black and White sets. Black and White is a new, pow­er­ful set cre­ated this year which I sus­pect will be­come a new fa­vorite among fans. As al­ways, Kyodo loves to have fun – doing funny skits in be­tween sets, and al­ways show­ing off their skill and good humor through­out their per­for­mance.

Next was the drama team. Drama al­ways sets the theme for the show, typ­i­cally about the cur­rent is­sues of the Nikkei com­mu­nity. This year their per­for­mance cen­tered on re­cent buy­outs in Lit­tle Tokyo, hop­ing to bring at­ten­tion to what has been a de­cid­edly stealthy move by cor­po­ra­tions that may end up re­mov­ing a large chunk of the cul­ture from Lit­tle Tokyo. This year’s set had plenty of humor to go along with it, oc­ca­sion­ally pok­ing fun at rival Los An­ge­les col­lege USC. They brought back a run­ning joke from last year’s per­for­mance which re­ally had the croud bust­ing up. This per­for­mance was split into sev­eral parts, spread through­out the night.

The Odori (tra­di­tional dance) team opened up with their typ­i­cal slow, ex­ag­ger­ated, metic­u­lous dance. But some­thing was dif­fer­ent this year – for the first time I’ve seen, they are using a bit more mod­ern music. They per­formed Gion Kouta, and ex­pertly merged it’s more com­plex and slightly faster music with the tra­di­tional Odori style. This ap­proach was a pleas­ant sur­prise, and puts them more in line with Kyodo’s tra­di­tional-mod­ern hy­brid style.

NSU Mod­ern’s first set was their very en­er­getic Mad Hat­ter’s Tea Party, which is a real treat to see live. Mod­ern re­ally shines here, show­ing a true pas­sion for in­no­va­tion in dance—these guys must sweat pure con­cen­trated skill.

After a short in­ter­mis­sion, Odori started the show per­form­ing the aptly named Mat­suri, also a more mod­ern up­beat song. This was evoca­tive of a real mat­suri (fes­ti­val) in Japan and was very fun to watch!

Kyodo came back to per­form Yon­sei, Nanairo, and of course their sig­na­ture fi­nale En­core. Nanairo is a new set cre­ated by this year’s new­bie class, but not to fear—this has all the en­ergy you’d ex­pect in a Kyodo per­for­mance. Kyodo holds a spe­cial place in my heart—the first time I saw them left me spell­bound, caus­ing me to fall in love with taiko and seek it out any­where I could find it. I’ve been to many taiko per­for­mances since then—most of them fea­tur­ing Kyodo—so I am quite fa­mil­iar with En­core. Yet after all this time, it still fills me with the same glee as if I was see­ing it for the first time.

Mod­ern closed the night with their Tribal and Jazz sets, both of which I've never seen be­fore. Tribal was typ­i­cal Mod­ern style—en­er­getic, fun, super sexy, and good beats. Jazz took a com­pletely dif­fer­ent turn with a strong bal­let per­for­mance, show­ing Mod­ern’s di­ver­sity.

And that’s the night, it was a blast! I was happy to see Leech Sen­sei there, my awe­some Japan­ese teacher from high school. Looks like he brought even more kids than when I orig­i­nally came to a CN with him, so I’m glad to see Japan­ese is get­ting more pop­u­lar! I just hope they aren’t giv­ing him as hard of a time as I did, read­ing Dune in class and ar­gu­ing with him about the mer­its of Quake vs. Di­a­blo II ;).

Edit: added miss­ing Kyodo and Mod­ern videos, and up­dated the ex­ist­ing links to the CN2009 ver­sions. Thanks zachirie!

NSU Culture Night 2009

There are only a few weeks left until the 23rd an­nual NSU Cul­ture Night at UCLA. This is a re­ally fun night ex­plor­ing Japan­ese-Amer­i­can cul­ture. There will be taiko (drum­ming), mod­ern dance, drama, and odori (tra­di­tional dance) per­for­mances. These groups are uni­ver­sity kids so they know how to have fun—every time I’ve seen them per­form it has been a phe­nom­e­nal ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s free and open to all so if you’re in­ter­ested and can get to UCLA’s Royce Hall at 6:00pm on Pres­i­dents’ Day (Feb­ru­ary 16th), you can re­serve tick­ets by send­ing an email with your name and num­ber of tick­ets to nsuculturenight2009@​gmail.​com.

Nabe shuts down, in comes Shabu Shabuyo

Nabe en­tered Lit­tle Tokyo about a year ago, bring­ing with it a new choice for shabu shabu. I often went there in­stead of Shabu Shabu House sim­ply be­cause I didn’t want to brave the per­pet­ual 45-60min lines. The food was good, and they had lots of de­cent ap­pe­tiz­ers. De­spite hav­ing great food, Nabe was void of cus­tomers every time I ate there. Alas, no­body can com­pete with Shabu Shabu House: they where the first shabu shabu restau­rant in the USA and have had a lot of time to grow buzz and per­fect their fla­vor. It was only a mat­ter of time. The mon­ster has killed yet an­other com­peti­tor.

I went down­town last night and was woe­fully dis­ap­pointed to dis­cover some­one in their place: Shabu Shabuyo. A small menu, split ce­ramic pots, elec­tric heaters that don’t bring the water to a boil, crappy cheap chop­sticks, and re­ally re­ally bad music play­ing. This place bet­ter find some­thing good to pro­vide quick or they’ll be going out of busi­ness in record time.

Odd new ramen place in Little Tokyo

Just tried this new ramen place in­side Weller Court called Chin-Ma-Ya of Tokyo, right below the in­fa­mous Oro­chon Ramen. Their spe­cialty is tan tan men, a fu­sion of ramen with Chi­nese dan dan mian. They serve it with three lev­els of spice, and I or­dered the spici­est “orig­i­nal”. The broth was good – very thick and murky, lots of good fla­vor, and ad­e­quately spicy. It lost a bit in the top­pings, com­ing with ground beef, ground pork, and only a few stray bits of spinach. I got a side of gyoza, which while not the worst I’ve had where def­i­nitely far from the best.

But where it re­ally failed was the noo­dles. The first bite im­me­di­ately made me think of some­thing I never thought would come to mind in a ramen place: my mom bak­ing cook­ies. Cu­ri­ously tak­ing an­other bite, I tasted it again. The fla­vor was al­most like unsweet­ened cookie dough. I’m usu­ally down for try­ing new things, some fla­vors need to just grow on you. But after eat­ing half the bowl I couldn’t take any more – the heav­i­ness of the noo­dles com­bined with such a strange fla­vor was too much for me.

Looks like Daikokuya gets to keep their crown, with San Sui Tei com­ing in sec­ond if the Daikokuya line is un­bear­ably long. Last time I went to San Sui Tei, they cooked up some fresh choco­late-filled mochi balls for me. Not sure if they will be the norm or if they where test­ing them on me as a re­cur­ring cus­tomer, but they where good!

More on Japanese in Windows

If you just ripped your Japan­ese music col­lec­tion only to find out Win­dows Ex­plorer can’t dis­play any of the tags, you prob­a­bly used ID3 v2.4. Win­dows does not sup­port 2.4—if you down­grade the files to ID3 v2.3, every­thing will dis­play just fine. A good tool that can do this en masse is Mp3­tag. This doesn’t only af­fect the UTF-8 fields: Win­dows won’t be able to read album art or any­thing else if you use v2.4.

Adding Japanese support to Windows Mobile 6.1

The Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1 up­date just hit for my Black­jack II, and I’m lik­ing it quite a bit. One prob­lem, though, is that it seems to lack any Japan­ese fonts for the UI – every­thing shows up as those fa­mil­iar boxes. Here’s how to add the Meiryo font from Vista to your phone.

Caveat lec­tor: this in­volves mod­i­fy­ing the reg­istry on your phone. If you aren’t com­pletely con­fi­dent in your abil­i­ties with this, don’t do it. I’ve only done this on my AT&T Black­jack II run­ning the Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1 up­date. Phones are pretty damned ex­pen­sive, don’t blame me if you break yours!

You will need:

• Mo­bile Reg­istry Ed­i­tor
• Win­dows Mo­bile De­vice Cen­ter(6.1 or higher)

First you need to grab the font files from Vista, out of your Win­dows\Fonts dir. Ex­plorer doesn’t let you do this, so you can go via com­mand line or any other app with a Open File win­dow or some­thing sim­i­lar. You are look­ing for meiryo.​ttc and meiryob.​ttc. Once you’ve got these, copy them to your phone’s Win­dows\Fonts dir.

Next you’ll need to per­form some reg­istry edits on your phone. Open up Mo­bile Reg­istry Ed­i­tor and go to HKEY_LO­CAL_­MA­CHINE\Soft­ware\Mi­crosoft. Right click, and go to New->Reg­istry Key. Enter FontLink for the name. In­side of the FontLink key, add an­other key called Sys­tem­Link.

In­side the Sys­tem­Link key, right click and go to New->Multi-String Value. For the Value Name, enter Segoe Con­densed. For the Value Data, enter win­dows\fonts\meiryo.​ttc,Meiryo. To my knowl­edge Segoe Con­densed is the only font used in the UI on Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1, but you can re­peat this step re­plac­ing Segoe Con­densed with any fonts you want to add Japan­ese sup­port to.

Now go back to HKEY_LO­CAL_­MA­CHINE\Soft­ware\Mi­crosoft. Add a new key called Font­Path. In­side this key, right click and go to New->String Value. For Value Name, enter Font­Path. For Value Data, enter win­dows\fonts.

Now just re­boot the phone and it should have Japan­ese sup­port through­out the UI!

68th Annual Nisei Week has begun!

Nisei week is a fes­ti­val oc­cur­ing this week in Los An­ge­les’ Lit­tle Tokyo. If you’re in the area and look­ing for a good time, check it out—most of it is free! I will be at­tend­ing the REMIX con­cert on Sat­ur­day, and the Taiko Gath­er­ing on Sun­day. UCLA’s Kyodo Taiko and NSU Mod­ern will rock the house :D.