I’m working on catching up on stuff after being at the Hiroshima prefectural JET orientation, which was Wednesday through Friday of last week. The sessions were somewhat useful, covering stuff like how to live in Japan (and especially rural Japan), how to deal with classes, etc. Its also largely meant as a chance for JETs to get together to vent steam and support each other.

After the sessions on Wednesday, there was a 2 hour all-you-can-eat-and-drink-for-3000-yen party. It’d been billed as being at a beer garden, which is usually an open-air, rooftop type deal, but this was more a cafeteria type setting. Oh, well, at least the food and drink was fairly good. Then many, including myself, wandered over to a club to dance and drink some more. Can’t say I really had all that much fun there, alas. I usually like the club environment, but it didn’t seem I was doing very well socializing with some of the local JETs that’d met before and the music wasn’t particularly good either. So I eventually unhappily staggered back to the hotel.

Wasn’t in much of a mood the next day, but one of the other local JETs, Melissa, saw this and invited me along with her friends to lunch. That at least started to put improve my mood and sense of connection that’d been bruised the previous evening. Later in evening, after the day’s sessions were over, I ran into a bunch of other JETs (mostly from Fukuyama, but some from around Hiroshima too) and had a pretty good time with them.

We first went to The Shack, a tex-mex-ish resturant/bar that is one of several popular gaijin hangouts (seems many make a bit of a circuit, this being one stop). I’d already eaten (ran across the Mos Burger chain and just had to sample their stuff — pretty good!), so I just had a salid. But there wasn’t much “just” about it, it was pretty good, especially after not having as much in the way of greens as I probably should since coming here. Otherwise, chatted a bit and managed to get lucky and win a game of darts against a couple of the other guys.

The follow-up was a few rounds of bowling at this multi-storey entertainment building (it had a least a floor of video games, two or three floors of bowling alleys, probably a couple floors of karaoke, and a few of “leisure lounges” that I can only guess at since we didn’t see them…). Was pretty fun, even if I did my usual awful at the game itself.

After that, we hit the karaoke booth with about a dozen or so of us (yes, it was a little crowded). I’d never actually done karaoke before, but it was a lot more fun than I expected. While I’d say my singing was pretty bad even by karaoke standards, at least most of the group liked the music I chose (considering the half generation gap, I wasn’t so sure how they’d feel about Phil Colins, Cindy Lauper and such that I know best). Place had a really good selection of English songs and a few people that had a bit of Japanese gave some of those songs a go. The last dregs of us ambled home around 4:30am.

At that hour I was worried about whether I’d wake up before noon if I really went to sleep, so I just napped a bit off and on. Wasn’t that much worse for wear during the day. And the orientation ended at noon, so I had the rest of the day to wander around and explore, shop, etc. I made a few more discoveries of note along these lines.

First was the local Animate store and another anime store beside it, which was ironicly just around the corner from the place the first two days of orientation were held. Animate has mostly popular anime goods, stuff that’s big with a mainstream audience at the moment (lots of Naruto, Prince of Tennis, One Piece, etc). The place next door was a bit more fan oriented (and fan servicy) stuff. Neither had much that interested me.

Another is potentially more dangerous, I found the local Book Off. Book Off is a chain of used book stores that usually have a huge selection of manga for ?100-400 (about $1-4). Again, just finding stuff is a bit of a challenge, but I eventually picked up some Yawara, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (that I really had to hunt for) and misc. Lodoss volumes. Also picked up some artbooks, though there wasn’t much to choose from there. Biggest danger is the used CD area, seeing anime soundtracks for ?1000-2000 is a bit too tempting to pass up, so I picked up a few including several Cowboy Bebop ones.

One more blog worthy find was one that I had no interest in myself, but would have half the ladies in TASS on the next flight over here if they knew about it. Wandering the streets near the Comfort Hotel where I was staying, I happened across a place who’s English name was “Doujinshi Only Shop”. Seemed an odd place for it, but I wandered on in. First thing I noticed was I was the only, I mean only, male in the shop. There were probably a half dozen or so women looking over the selection of doujin that were undoubtedly (after taking a peek at the covers myself) yaoi or shonen ai. If anyone needs to know where it is, I might be able to find it again and at least took a pic of the sign for anyone that might need it.

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