April 4th-Rain Rain Go Away
This was my
last day in Osaka. Unfortunately it was
raining. In the morning it was just a
light drizzle, but it at night it started pouring. Oh well…that couldn’t be helped.
Hiromi and I started out the day by getting lunch at a Shinsaibashi café
and I got the special for the day. It
was ok, but it gave us some time to decide what we would do. Originally, we’d planned on going to the
Osaka aquarium, if it rained, but for some reason, neither of us seemed to be
too dreadfully interested in that today.
So, since we needed something we could do indoors, we decided to go to a
movie. We were sure what to see, but
then the only movie that we could think of that I actually wanted to see was “Bowling
for Columbine.” I thought it might
interest Hiromi because she’s interested in the US (she’s going to be living in
NYC from September to June). She read
the synopsis on her cell phone and found the theater and we went. I won’t turn this journal entry into a film
review; that’s not what it’s for. But I
would certainly recommend the movie. It
was…well…disturbing, I would say. It
took my a little while to explain the word “disturbing” to Hiromi but she got
it eventually. She was tired and
actually fell asleep for about 30 minutes half way through the thing. I can see how she, or any other Japanese,
might get bored in that movie. Almost
all of the movie, since it was about America obviously, would probably be hard
for a foreigner to really relate to or care about. If you’re not in the society [America], you can’t get the same
picture of it or understanding of what it’s really like to live in it. Also, the extensive interviews with facts,
histories, and statistics probably became a blur and exhausting given that it
was all done with subtitles. Again, I
felt special though, because I was the only one in the theater who could
understand the movie without the subtitles.
In other words, “Jimaku nashi wakaru no wa boku dake desu.” ＯＲ 字幕なし分かるのは僕だけです。Can your
computer read that? If it can’t,
right-click on the screen, click on “encoding” and select “Japanese” from the
list. If Japanese is not on your list,
you’re a loser and should download the software. Just kidding, you’re not a loser, you’re just unprepared! Anyway, after the movie we went to dinner
and a really cool restaurant. I think
Hiromi said that this was her favorite restaurant in Shinsaibashi. Inside it looked like a cross between a
gothic church and a place where a devil-worshipping cult might hang out. It was called Christon Café. I pointed out that they might mean “Christian”
since the décor had a heavily religious theme, but she thought they did it on
purpose. The food had nothing to do
with the theme, but it was fancy food and the prices were very reasonable. After dinner, I ended back to my hotel to
get ready to leave Osaka; tomorrow I’m going to Miyazaki, where I’ll spend my
next four months in Japan.
-Maikeru