Exploring Anime Holy Land Sites in Osaka
Greetings from sunny Osaka! I’m still down here in the Kansai region, traveling around looking at beautiful temples and shrines and experiencing the local food culture. I’m a person who loves the idea of a “bucket list,” a personal list of things I want to do before I kick the bucket, and this trip has certainly allowed me to scratch some items off my list. I climbed to the top of Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, and made a pilgrimage to the Kyoto Animation headquarters…and the McDonald’s where the animators eat. I also visited some awesome “holy land sites” from anime, including walking up “Haruhi Hill” to North High School and eating breakfast at the “Endless Eight” cafe. I also stayed at the Nara Hotel, a wonderful 100 year old hotel that Einstein stayed at, and touched the piano he played while he was here, something I’ve always wanted to do.
Back in my SDSU days, I studied linguistics with a focus on child language acquisition. This had an odd effect on my kids because it allowed me to test my theories of how to raise bilingual children on them, doing things like only buying DVDs only from America (even anime) so they had to learn English if they wanted to watch anything, and in fact they didn’t know DVDs could come with Japanese language on them until the age of five or so. One feature of language learning in kids is called “U-shaped development,” which is when children appear to regress in communication skills, for example saying “we ate it” correctly then falling back to “we eated it.” It seems to us like the child is regressing, but they’re actually internalizing new grammatical rules — the “ed” for past tense in this case — then over-applying it all words while they explore the various boundaries of language.
Over the past few days I’ve been wondering whether my own language skills haven’t been regressing in a similar way. The goal of every serious student of Japanese is to study until everyone stops complimenting how good your Japanese is and just talks to you normally, but in tourist area like Kyoto and Nara, suddenly everyone is praising my Japanese, even though I’ve been here 25+ years. I felt like I’ve regressed for another reason: because I’m in an unfamiliar part of Japan, I’m unable to read about 25% of the place names in kanji because different regions always have unique local readings that only locals can follow completely.
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J-List has enjoyed 2018 Japanese calendar season, and we’ve sold more awesome anime, traditional Japanese photo, sexy idol and JAV calendars than ever before. We decided to have one final sale and close out all of our existing stock, so you can save even more money. We’re having a final 50% off sale, allowing you to get the gorgeous anime, artist illustration and other calendars you want at a great price, with no minimums. Thanks, and go get some awesome calendars!
