My Experience in Japan (so far)



An image of the handheld game console known as the WonderSwan.

DJ Hadoken has this to say:

I had to write a report for the study abroad program about my impression of Japan so far.

What do you guys think? I doubt that they will leave our homepage address at the end, but it’d be pretty cool if they did.

Anyway, here it is.
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My Experience in Japan (so far)
Young Adult Editorial

Written by DJ Hadoken


While staying in Japan, I’ve come to notice that everything is either amazingly expensive, or oddly cheap.

I really don’t feel like dwelling further into that topic, because it’s pretty much self-explanatory. Anyone should expect Japan to be expensive.

With this in mind, after about 3 weeks of spending blindly, I finally had the time to calculate how much I have spent since I got here, and I didn’t like what it added up to. Although most of it was necessity (i.e. train tickets in Tokyo, uniform accessories..) so I won’t have to worry too much about that.

I think the best part about staying here is, obviously (to everyone out there who knows who they are and will no doubt agree with me), having unlimited access to anime, manga, video games and J-POP.

I’ve worked out a system as to be able to efficiently and adequately buy as much of these items as possible. However, I’ve found that J-POP CDs are ridiculously expensive. About $40 in a store. So it is better to just stick to downloading MP3s rather than spending a limited amount of yen on them.

Maybe a CD here or there for diehard groups, or groups that are hard to find MP3s of. Like Cascade. At least.. for me it’s been hard to find their MP3s.

Aside from that, I’ve decided to focus mainly on manga and video games. The former being very cheap, and the latter being reasonable.

Manga is a little less than $5 an issue, or magazine (like Shonen Jump). The magazines are packed with manga so it’s worth every yen or cent, whatever you want to call it.

Also, another great thing is that Japan recently legalized the sale of used video games. The price gap between used games and new games is surprising.

I saw at one store that WonderSwan games were being sold for less than $5, compared to the newest ones which were about $45. Although I’m not sure if the ones I saw that time were technically used, or if the stores were just trying to get rid of some stock.

But nonetheless, pretty interesting. I’m hoping to get lucky one of these days and find a good PSX or Dreamcast game in one of the used game “bargain bins”.

Now, I’ll talk about my plan.

I’ve decided to spend as little money as possible on food and concentrate solely on buying materialistic things that will ultimately contaminate my mind.

At this one grocery store, they sell this big bag of popcorn for 80 yen (that’s about 80 cents). I’d say it has enough popcorn to last me an entire week. My host family feeds me lunch and dinner. Sometimes I get snacks, but not too much. So I think a bag of popcorn or some equivalent is enough to tide me over between hours. Nice and cheap, so that’s good.

As for anime, I’ve been very disappointed.

The whole image that I had before I arrived that Japanese television is riddled with anime has been erased. The anime comes via satellite TV.. a service called Sky Perfect in the case of my host family. And it is all spread over many different channels, which, for each channel you have to pay a separate monthly fee. So let’s say about $20 a month for just 4 channels.

Disappointing.

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But the Japanese game shows are just as great as most people think they are. It’s hard to talk with the Japanese students about the game shows though, because I haven’t met anyone who understands the word “game show” yet.

Oh well. Must study more Japanese.

As for school. It’s school.

I’m assuming that the other exchange students are probably going to talk about it.

School is okay. If I were a Japanese student I’d hate it, just like students at American schools. You have to get up early, get home late. Little sleep. It’s a universal feeling.

But I’m not a Japanese student. I’m an exchange student.

So in my case, I don’t mind going to school.

Speaking of sleep, I just lost sleep writing this. So I’ll stop now.

DJ Hadoken.. RIA..
https://www.riafunk.blog/2001/03/httpwwwdotgeocitiesdotcomslashriafunk.html

Click the big RIA logo at the bottom.
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DONE.


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