Day 2

We went to Akihabara again. And yeah, I went to Club Sega again. What can I say, I'm really competitive. I finally beat someone today, I suspect he wasn't one of the stronger players though. I did pretty well against everybody actually except for the Slayers. I don't think I understand that matchup.

I'm way out of practice, but in this environment if I play consistently (which I probably won't be able to do until autumn, and even that's only if I'm smart with my budgeting) it won't take me long to get back to where I was and probably surpass that by a factor of ten.

We ate at a Pepper Lunch today, which was the same amount of food as Yoshinoya -- and even more or less the same kind, except it comes on a hot plate and you have to cook it yourself -- but costs twice as much. Figure that one out. The beef was a little higher-quality, but I'm not all that finnicky an eater -- I am pretty miserly though.

I couldn't really understand the waitress. In fact, this is becoming a bigger problem than I'd expected; my spoken Japanese was never my strong suit, but I'd never had any trouble following along in class exercises and I wasn't expecting to be completely blindsided like that.

My friend wanted to buy an electronic dictionary, so we did a lot of walking around Akiba looking through electronics stores. It's not too hot out here right now, but they have these drink vending machines all over -- like several a block -- and it's hard to resist the siren song. Almost everything I've had so far has been lemon-flavored, which might sound like kind of an odd choice but when you've been walking around in the summer sun for eight hours it's really good.

We got assaulted by these guys with a camera who were going a mile a minute: "Nihongo wakarimasu ka?" "Intaabyuu OK desu ka?" "Nihon TV desu." I have mixed feelings about what I did next.

I think "man on the street" inverviews are stupid in the first place, and the way foreigners are portrayed on Japanese TV doesn't always sit well with me either. On the other hand, the whole point of this study abroad thing is to try things I wouldn't do at home, so I went along with it... to the best of my abilities, anyway.

I forgot to mention it, but there was a mass murder here at noon on Sunday. I guess on Sundays in Akiba they close off the main roads to traffic and there are approximately eight gajillion pedestrians. Some guy with mental problems got in a truck, plowed it into the crowd, killing four people, and then got out, pulled out a knife and started attacking people. He killed seven and put ten more in the hospital. It's been all over the news, like it'll be on three or four news networks at the same time.

The TV guys wanted to know what we thought about that. My answer was basically "I can't really put it into words in Japanese," because I didn't really feel it was my place to say anything. Of course it's tragic but I felt it would have been disrespectful to go on about it in my second language when it's not like I know shit about Akiba culture. They asked us if we were at all scared to be in Akiba and again I didn't want to answer because how can you say "not really, since this kind of thing hapens in the US pretty often" without sounding flippant?

They also asked us why we went to Akihabara, and I answered, which in retrospect was not terribly bright -- since I went there to buy electronics and go to arcades. I'm sure that's all they'll put on TV, if anything at all.

So that was a dumb decision all things considered. But whatever. We were so confused since they put us on the spot, hopefully they didn't even bother with it.