(Ms.) Tomo Kimura’s Translation/Tokyo Notes

Oricon

The way most people input nihongo on a computer is that you first type it in romaji, which is converted automatically to hiragana on-screen. When you hit the space bar, a candidate for the kanji conversion is shown. If it’s not the one you want, you hit the space bar again, and a whole list of possible candidates is shown. If you don’t want kanjis, just katakana, you hit the F7 key.

Thus おりこん, when converted to katakana, オリコン, is the Japanese equivalent of the Billboard music chart. (They have other ranking charts as well.)

If おりこん is converted as お離婚, it means “the divorce.”

The Sake Ms. Oshige is Drinking

The kanji on the bottle mean “Peach” and “Cherry Blossom”

New: Storm of Love

This is an afternoon soap opera slot.

Ishihara Yoshizumi is an actor as well as being a weatherman on the evening news (on the same channel that this soap opera was broadcast). He played a not-so-nice character in the soap, and this is why Ms. Tanemura and her assistants were upset at him after watching him in the afternoon, and then seeing him smiling and giving the weather forecasts in the evening ^^;;;

Meroko Apologizing to Mitsuki

The way Meroko apologizes (sitting up straight, hands down, and bowing), is a very polite way of showing that you’re sincerly sorry.

If you bowed deeply enough that your head was pressed to the ground, that is called dogeza, and is the “most sorry” gesture you could make. I’ve seen a press conference where a pharmaceutical company involved in a major scandal (their tainted blood products resulted in many hemophiliacs contacting AIDS) , after the conference, had the CEO and board members come from behind the desk and do the dogeza in front of the press and the affected victims.

The Under-age Speech Contest

This is a reference to a speech contest held on public television called the “Coming-of-Age Speech Contest.” This was a contest where people who’d come of age (= age 20) would give speeches on various topics. The contest used to be held on “Coming-of-Age day,” a national holiday. (The holiday used to be Jan. 15, now it’s the second Monday of January.)

Shibuya Location

The building Madoka’s commercial is shown seems to be the QFRONT building. It’s a building with a big display on its side.

Denny’s

Yes, there are Denny’s in Japan. If you go to the suburbs, there are quite a number of them around.

On weekends, to relax, I read…more manga ヽ(^ヮ^)ﾉ　わはー　

I finally got around to getting Umino Tsunami’s “Daisy Luck.” I’d read some chapters when it ran in Kiss magazine, but I was now able to read the series from beginning to end (it’s two volumes).

The series follows the love/work lives of four childhood friends as they hit age 30. I like the fairly realistic portrayal of work life in this series.

I saw my blog being referenced as “his blog” in the livejournal Shojo Beat community (arema

Well, since Tomo can be a prefix for both male and female names, I guess it can’t be helped, but FYI, I’m female (-’-)

Now that it seems Vol. 2 has hit the bookstores, I will start writing my notes, probably starting next week. Looks like the amount of notes will be about the same as those for the first volume.

I don’t need other manga or music to get me started working on NANA. All I need to do is to think back to my college days, when I didn’t have much clues on how to get a relationship working right, and I’m in the right stomach churning mode (hehe

Before I start work on Full Moon, I usually read one or two of Takamiya Satoru’s one-shot works to get me in the right mood. Her stories are lovely and sweet, just the right stories to get me started (^^)

Takamiya-san draws for Ciao Deluxe and Chuchu.

Vol. 2 is available now.

Hmmm…Amazon lists the publication date as August 23rd…does it take that much longer to reach bookstores?

Candies

A 3-girl idol group popular in the 70’s.

Ayaya

The idol Matsuura Aya

Morning Musume

An all-girls idol group. Kago, Gomaki, Natcchi, Rika are present and past members of Morning Musume.

Mini-Moni was a sub-group of Morning Musume, with all members being less than 150cm tall. This is a different sub-group from Petit-Moni.

Baby Castella

This is often sold at food stalls that are set up when there are festivals. It’s a little bigger than a quail’s egg. Regular castella, originally brought over from Portugal, is like a light pound cake, rectangular in shape.

Shio Biifun

Biifun is noodles made of rice flour. Shio Biifun is biifun stir-fried with vegetables, meat, etc. and flavored with shio (= salt).

Jingisukan

(This is the Japanese way of saying Genghis Khan.)
A very popular dish in Hokkaido. You cook lamb or mutton on a helmet-shaped pan put on charcoal, and put vegetables on the rim, so the veggies catch the meat juice.

Nowadays jingisukan is popular as “diet food,” as mutton’s supposed to burn off fat and calories better than other types of meat. So there are Jingisukan places popping up all over Tokyo.

Yami Nabe

This is, uh, more of an event rather than enjoying food. What you do is have each person bring something (better be at least edible, and solid!). You make the room dark, then dump what people brought in the nabe (= pot) with broth in it. The point of making the room dark is so that you don’t know what’s in the nabe. After the stuffs are well boiled, each person then picks something from the nabe, and has to take at least a bite of it, no matter how gross it might be. (-”-)