the tall blond guy goes to japan

Romangi Sucks

Akasaka

Japanese written language has a few different alphabets. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, I think they do it just for fun and to confuse foreigners. Often, they're mixed up in mid-sentence. There's the ones they stole from Chinese. They look the same, more or less, but they're promounced differently (except for "tea", which is really good to know).

Then there's the phonetic alphabet. It's more simple and curly than the Chinesey ones, which tend to be more complex. There seem to be a bunch of different versions of the phonetic one. I'm not exactly sure how they all interrelate, but in any case, know they exist.

Then, there's one called "romanji", where they basically boiled down the Japanese sounds into what may be something approacting readable by non-Japanese readers. Like me. The problem is that romangi tries to fit a whole pallette of discrete sounds into just 26 letters and combinations thereof.

I bring this up because of my adventure this morning.

The other day, a couple of my coworkers went shopping in an outdoor market in a place called "Asakusa". They said it was very cool and they liked it alot. I decided to go this morning. I was looking at my trusty subway map, when I found what I thought was the place. I got on the subway, followed what was something like their instructions when I got to the station, and didn't find even a hint of an outdoor mall. Ugh. Boo.

I did, however, see lots of foreigners wandering around. Apparently, the CBS Tokyo offices are around here somewhere, and they're on full busy mode for the Nagano Olympics. In my wandering, I also found the place where Sony does PlayStation stuff. I bowed respectfully as I walked by.

Unfortunately, I also saw this:

It spreading like some kind of fungus.

Although I was thirsty, I kept walking in search of something better.

So, I saw another Sony building, lots of foreigners, and a Starbucks. I'd hoped for some good shopping.

The station I was looking for was called "Asakusa". I went in the wrong direction to "Akasaka". In romangi, these two stations look very similar. When promounced (incorrectly) from the romangi, they sound similar. However, when read in the other forms, they're completely different. So this is what it's like being illiterate.