In Okazaki, they held a marathon of their own this morning though the term is used loosely here. I heard about the New Year`s run from the Okazaki International Association newsletter back in December but it`s only three kilometers long along the banks of the Oto River. It turned out to be more of a run for the schools in the area as there were a few hundred kids wearing school uniforms during the race in waves during the morning. When it came to my turn, there were only 26 adult runners (all men), and most were pretty fast. I think I came in somewhere near fifteenth but I wasn`t very fast that day. Wish I felt comfortable about bringing the camera along but I didn`t know anyone at the run which meant I had to stash my bag somewhere while I ran. I did talk to some of the runners afterwards but it turns out many of them actually belong to a badminton club (and many of them beat me too!) so I`m still left wanting a group to run with here.
This was also the first day many of the stores re-opened after the holiday. I amused my classmates back on Christmas about the Boxing Day sales that immediately follow and how some people spend a good part of Christmas Day lining up at a store to take advantage of the bargains. It wasn`t nearly as bad here but I noticed on the way to the run that quite a few people were lined up already an hour before stores opened.
I wanted to check out the sales myself but hadn`t planned on spending a lot of time. I ended up spending the whole afternoon browsing. I have a short list of things I wanted to buy while I was here. Japan isn`t known for bargains so I didn`t think there was going to be a lot of widespread sales like this around. I actually didn`t buy much, a couple of mangas and a fukubukuro full of snack food (that`ll take care of that end of the groceries for the month). I also picked up a small self-inflating pad from the Sports Authority to see if it`ll make things more comfortable for my back on the futon.
I hadn`t planned on it beforehand either, but I also did do some serious shopping for an electronic dictionary. I never shopped for one back home since I had them in book form already and I also had one for reference in my PDA which I brought with me here. Besides, the selection in Vancouver is either limited or very expensive. I did come to Japan with a pair of old-fashioned handbook sized dictionaries and a big kanji one but you can`t always carry them around, though I was able to use the smaller ones during classes. In many ways, I find the book form more convenient. It wasn`t until I started looking at the ones in Okazaki part of the reason why I didn`t pick one up in Japan during my previous trips.
The main problem I find with these devices here are that they are mostly designed for Japanese users (naturally). It was tough before working with these things when everything about them is in Japanese, including the instruction booklet. Of course, with time, like all other electronic devices, the capability of these things have grown incredibly, but for me, the root problem was still a factor. The ones I was sampling in the Eiden store was giving me outputs with a fair amount of kanji in them but no evident way of how to read it. It didn`t help that the store staff didn`t know how to do get a read-out in hiragana either (the other thing to note about these things is that I have yet to see one display the Japanese in romaji text; you have to be able to at least read hiragana and katakana). It didn`t make sense that you couldn`t. These were made for even kids to use but it would still take them awhile to learn how to read all the basic 2,000 kanji characters.
Fortunately, I found out that at least one brand had some of their instruction manuals in English available at the store (thanks Canon). Some you had to purchase for 1,000 yen but I found an open one on the shelf to scan over. From what I can tell, you can`t tell these devices to automatically change their kanji displays but it looks like they all have a `Jump` function for getting kanji read-outs. I found, though, they work differently for each device so, like all the testing I was doing with them, there was a fair bit of trial and error (I also haven`t seen a `help` function on these things yet).
It`s amazing how much information they pack in these things these days. There are entries for tens to hundreds of thousands of words, kanji, and even katakana characters . There are separage devices for translating Japanese into languages such as Chinese and German, but the one I am looking at buying also covers those languages in one unit (in a more limited way) as well as Korean, French, Italian, and Spanish (sorry Canon). Too bad I didn`t have my wallet with me (which I also didn`t bring because of the run). Gonna have to do it on Sunday before the sale ends.
I could have gone back and taken care of it that day but it was now dark and I skipped lunch so I was hungry. Besides, I had planned to spend most of the day cleaning up my room (my delayed Osouji, or great cleaning done at the end of the year). While making and eating dinner, there was a variety quiz show on the TV. It`s one thing on the TV here that`s beginning to grow on me since the questions cover a wide range of subjects from Japanese language to news, people, geography and math. It was just odd to see Takeshi Kitano as the host using a pointer with a big red rubber hand on it. It was also funny listening to the manga question master (with a kiddish voice) telling the celebrities `Chigau!` (wrong) at times. I did manage to clean up the clutter in the room so while Saturday wasn`t as relaxing as I had planned it but it was fairly productive.