Childhood's End Translation

[GhaleonOne]

Yahoo Japan is likely the best source, but as usual, without a way to ship to the US, you're screwed. Almost all the sellers only ship within Japan. There are resources out there though.

[Racoati]

KF, when'd you go? I'm guessing this was a while ago now....

I went on a doujin hunt in Japan in March last year. A bit harder to find stuff than I thought, especially since the fandom I was searching in was quite small and unpopular, but still came back with a 20+ haul.

[Alunissage]

I got my EB novels through Sasuga Japanese Bookstore, but they're out of stock on them, I'm pretty sure. The rest I got from a person I'd bought other stuff from on eBay who also looked for requested Lunar items for me privately. It did take quite some time to get some of them.

Speaking of Lunar items, I should have some good stuff in about three weeks...a package that was supposed to get to me while I was at my parents' for vacation didn't get sent out until yesterday and (of course) will arrive at my folks' home address and sit there until my mom comes here in mid-Feb. Unless I can't stand it any longer and drive down next weekend to pick it up, but that seems kind of silly, as does having them ship it up to me when I've already paid shipping once. I really wish I'd asked about its status just about six hours earlier so it would be sent to my home address.

[Kizyr]

KF, when'd you go? I'm guessing this was a while ago now....

I went on a doujin hunt in Japan in March last year. A bit harder to find stuff than I thought, especially since the fandom I was searching in was quite small and unpopular, but still came back with a 20+ haul.

Not really. I was in Japan during the first half of 2004--that's when I bought the Lunar novels (I finally got the last one in April, I think). I was also there over the summer in 1999, which is when I got all the manga. I picked up a couple duplicates last time I was there, though.

I don't go doujin shopping, though. About 90% of doujinshi is porn and most stores that sell them don't organize them, unlike with books. KF

[Racoati]

Alunissage: ooh, now I'm kind of vicariously excited. My Lunar: EBC strategy guide ought to be arriving in about... eh, six weeks; something you all already have, no doubt, but I'm a newbie, I'm excited nonetheless.

KF-- wow, where'd you go? We did a tour of the anime and comic stores, "mainstream" and small; we probably went to some of the same places.

As for doujin, I'm not exactly offended by porn, so I don't mind running into them. I'm chiefly after them for the really nice artwork pieces that a lot of them will have; it's kind of amazing what I'll pay for a pretty picture or two of some characters I really like. (I've turned up some good non-porn finds, too. Not Lunar, sadly; this was Noir.)

[red9_merchant]

Wait, doujin is porn? I have doujin, and none of it even has nudity. Then again, it is FF6, so I guess it might not count... :/

[Alunissage]

"about 90% of it" is not all of it. Kiz is just saying that most doujin happens to be pornographic in nature (hentai).

I'm not sure what you mean by FF6 not counting.

[red9_merchant]

"about 90% of it" is not all of it. Kiz is just saying that most doujin happens to be pornographic in nature (hentai).

I'm not sure what you mean by FF6 not counting.

Okay. Makes sense now.

I don't know either. I wasn't thinking. It's been a long day. Just disregard that.

[Kizyr]

KF-- wow, where'd you go? We did a tour of the anime and comic stores, "mainstream" and small; we probably went to some of the same places.

As for doujin, I'm not exactly offended by porn, so I don't mind running into them. I'm chiefly after them for the really nice artwork pieces that a lot of them will have; it's kind of amazing what I'll pay for a pretty picture or two of some characters I really like. (I've turned up some good non-porn finds, too. Not Lunar, sadly; this was Noir.)

It's not that I'm offended. But I don't feel like sifting through a bunch of smut rags to find a couple gems here and there, particularly when I have to elbow between a bunch of guys looking for that kind of stuff while I'm at it. For most types of media, there are clearly delineated sections for adult material (video games, manga, movies, and arcade games, e.g.). Doujinshi are the exception where it's all unfiltered; you just have to look through a bunch of stuff.

There's a reason I don't care about collecting doujinshi, even if it's Lunar-related. Since anyone can make one, well, anything can crop up.

I was living in Kasugai and studying at Nanzan University in Nagoya. I did a little travelling around, and spent most of my breaks in Tokyo since I have family there. In 1999 I stayed in Nagoya as well; completely coincidental. It's possible we went to the same places, then again it's possible we didn't. I liked shopping for books and used video games, but that wasn't the reason I was there. KF

[Racoati]

KF -- hey, 'tis fair enough, each to their own and all that. As for me, I was just in Tokyo for ten days with my then girlfriend -- partly shopping, partly for the sights. I'd been meant to study in Japan for a year as part of university, but I changed courses because the Japanese teacher at our university was borderline abusive. (I wasn't the only one to think so; half of the class quit after a year.)

red9_merchant -- I've a couple of FF6 doujin too, none of them hentai (the "worst" I have is one that's shounen-ai -- the others are gen). Finding decent images of Celes (my favourite character) is an absolute biatch, though; she's not in most of them, and I only have one which has her in to any extent and in which she actually looks pretty (which was mainly what I bought it for).

[red9_merchant]

red9_merchant -- I've a couple of FF6 doujin too, none of them hentai (the "worst" I have is one that's shounen-ai -- the others are gen). Finding decent images of Celes (my favourite character) is an absolute biatch, though; she's not in most of them, and I only have one which has her in to any extent and in which she actually looks pretty (which was mainly what I bought it for).

Celes is in most of mine, but I don't have them with me at the moment, so I couldn't tell you if any of them Celes actually looks pretty. Though, I am doing scanlations, so they'll be up an about, and probably stolen for other peoples credit. :/ But I can't stand finding hentai doujin. Luckily, the person I buy from does not deal in them.

[Racoati]

I'll look forward to it! I promise not to steal them without crediting you.

You ought to stamp a "from [x site], not to be redistributed without permission" watermark on the bottom of them, or something.... Doesn't necessarily stop them doing it, but at least other people who visit the site will know they're stealing.

[Kizyr]

KF -- hey, 'tis fair enough, each to their own and all that. As for me, I was just in Tokyo for ten days with my then girlfriend -- partly shopping, partly for the sights. I'd been meant to study in Japan for a year as part of university, but I changed courses because the Japanese teacher at our university was borderline abusive. (I wasn't the only one to think so; half of the class quit after a year.)

Not really convincing, sorry. Japanese is the most-dropped language that people study; usually about half the people who start studying Japanese don't continue onto the second year, and perhaps about half of that doesn't continue onto the third or further. The drop rates in other languages I've never noticed to be as high.

Not saying that the teacher wasn't abusive, just that half the students dropping the class isn't necessarily an indication of that.

People in the US won't run into as much hentai manga because of going through a third party. Someone else filters out the crap, so if you buy from someone who's shipping to the US, or from some anime convention, the filtering's already been done, so it's easy to avoid what you don't want. KF

[Shiva Indis]

Japanese is the most-dropped language that people study; usually about half the people who start studying Japanese don't continue onto the second year, and perhaps about half of that doesn't continue onto the third or further. The drop rates in other languages I've never noticed to be as high.

I can believe that, though I wonder why it's so. My first inclanation is to attribute it to rising interest among younger people with less realistic expectations about how learning a foriegn language (especially one with no cognates to one's first language) should proceed. I talked with my Japanese teacher about the shift in the demographics once - she said that Japanese classes used to be made up mostly of people with Japanese ancestry or business students, while these days it's mostly people with interest in Japan's popular culture.

It gets me thinking of the near-legendary "So You Want to Learn Japanese..." essay. http://www.theforeigner-japan.com/archi ... panese.htm

[Racoati]

I do see your point; a lot of the people in our class were interested heavily in the pop culture, myself included, and I can understand where the "wow, this isn't all genki wai otaku" part would factor in. But equally most of the class were very bright students who were doing well, including some mature students who'd studied the language before; in that case I do think it kind of was the forcing 50-year-old women to stand on tables, rifling through our personal belongings and bringing people to open tears in class what did it.

I hear one of the students did try to get some action taken against her, though I don't know what became of it.

[Alunissage]

There's a reason I don't care about collecting doujinshi, even if it's Lunar-related. Since anyone can make one, well, anything can crop up.

Yeah, I remember that one with Lucia on the cover slipping off her uniform showing up pretty frequently on eBay a few years ago; fortunately, that seems to have disappeared. (No, I didn't buy it.)

I do think it kind of was the forcing 50-year-old women to stand on tables, rifling through our personal belongings and bringing people to open tears in class what did it.

What was THAT about?

[Kizyr]

I can believe that, though I wonder why it's so. My first inclanation is to attribute it to rising interest among younger people with less realistic expectations about how learning a foriegn language (especially one with no cognates to one's first language) should proceed. I talked with my Japanese teacher about the shift in the demographics once - she said that Japanese classes used to be made up mostly of people with Japanese ancestry or business students, while these days it's mostly people with interest in Japan's popular culture.

It's largely true, yeah. I've noticed (and talked about) the demographics of Japanese classes as well. The school I graduated from had an excellent Japanese program, although a couple of the other foreign-language programs were lacking (Chinese, notably; though by the same token the Romance, Slavic, and Middle Eastern classes had a good reputation).

Likewise, yeah, a lot of people start out taking Japanese without realizing what it takes to study it. Granted, getting interested in the language due to pop-culture is fine (that's how I first got interested, myself); but, the students who can't really get a grasp on what the country and culture are really like beyond what they'd like to perceive it as, they're the ones who'll drop out and fast. And while a certain percentage will drop out for other reasons (can't fit into schedule, changing majors, etc.), that doesn't really suffice to account for the higher drop rate in Japanese courses.

With our school, it was the same way: over a 50% drop rate after the first year (this I heard by way of professors and students, since I started out in second-year), and perhaps a 50% drop rate after that. Although, the majority of the students are not ethnically tied to Japan--and the majority who stay in the higher levels have a more serious interest or understanding of Japan that goes beyond anime and video games.

I do see your point; a lot of the people in our class were interested heavily in the pop culture, myself included, and I can understand where the "wow, this isn't all genki wai otaku" part would factor in. But equally most of the class were very bright students who were doing well, including some mature students who'd studied the language before; in that case I do think it kind of was the forcing 50-year-old women to stand on tables, rifling through our personal belongings and bringing people to open tears in class what did it.

I have no clue what happened in your classes. My only point was that a high drop rate doesn't prove anything. ...rifling through personal belongings more than proves your point, though. I figured there had to be something more to this. KF

[Racoati]

...The standing on tables? Teaching hiragana. No kidding. We had to learn a certain set of characters every week, and then the next week they'd be presented to us on flash cards and we'd have to call out the name of the character in a round-robin -- pretty standard. Only if you got one of the characters wrong, you'd have to stand on the chair. If you got it wrong next time as well, you stood on the table. There were a good number of decently mature students in our class and all I remember thinking was, "...do you even have INSURANCE for that?" She thought it was a neat "game", apparently. I guess it might've been the kind of thing that would work in a traditional Japanese classroom, kind of like the making people hold buckets of water thing, but she sort of failed to see that this was a university class with people of all different backgrounds and ages and they weren't primarily high-schoolers.

I always kind of wondered what would have happened to her if someone'd fallen.

This was in the first couple of weeks as well. It just kind of went downhill from there. I remember how the Japanese students' society kind of degenerated into the I Survived Takako Society after the first week or so.

Rifling through people's stuff... she was trying to get objects in order to teach people words, but she did this by going through the personal effects people had on their tables, most of whom were just too shocked to respond. My bag was very clearly marked as being from a pharmacy... thankfully it only had shampoo or hair dye or some crap in it, but it could have had anything, condoms, haemmorhoid cream, anything that could have had potential to be really embarrassing.

I can't remember exactly what the crying in class was about, I just know it happened to one of the students.

Didn't put me off Japanese teachers for life, however; we had another teacher, name of Yoshiko, who was her polar opposite. Soft-voiced, very friendly, eager to see us learn, taught words by having us toss a little fluffy sheep toy around the class. It was like something out of some anime the way they were so different.