A new Japanese TV Drama

If you don’t know what a J-Drama is you might be a bit confused so let me clear that up really quick – J-Drama stands for Japanese Drama and at a given time there are many different series offered by different TV channels in Japan. They are even pretty popular abroad, though mostly in other Asian counties, and even in the US one can find fan subbed episodes of popular series.

Thanks to my Japanese teacher, Ms. Uchida, I heard about a new series starting yesterday and managed to catch the first episode. This particular series is called Konkatsu (婚かつ) – a mashup of [Kekkon (結婚) – marriage] and [Tonkatsu (とんかつ) – fried pork cutlets]. The main character is an unlucky young man, who after graduating from a pretty mediocre university gets fired from the job he manages to get. Even though his father owns a tonkatsu store he refuses to work there and lands a job at a small town’s town hall. His work is in a newly formed department formed as a part a national push to find ways for increasing the number of children per family. There is one catch though – during the interview, in order to get the job, he mentions that he is planning on getting married very soon himself when he does not even have a girlfriend…

The first episode yesterday was a lot of fun, even for someone not understanding most of the individual words in Japanese. It is on Fuji TV, every Monday, between 9 and 10 pm.

Yet another use of cellphones with IC - ViT

I have already wrote quite a bit about SuICa (and it's sister in Osaka, ICoCa) which makes life easy by letting you deposit money into an IC card (or a cellphone with IC) and use that card for paying for busses and trains as well as for shopping at certain stores. Well, capabilities of IC enabled cellphones do not end there. As the IC circuitry can be used for many different purposes pretty easily (at least that's the impression I got) a lot of different applications emerged. In the case of ViT, the focus is on movie tickets.

I go to Virgin Toho Cinemas in Roppongi pretty regularly (once every week or every two weeks) and they use ViT to let you reserve your tickets. Right after choosing your seats on their webpage and giving your cellphone number, you get an email sent to your cellphone with "tickets" attached. The attachment automatically launches the ViT "i-appli" on the phone and the application imports the tickets which means when you go to the movie theatre and flash your phone at the ticket machine (bypassing the waiting line) your tickets will be automatically printed out. The application is extremely easy to install and even for someone with primitive Japanese skills like me, directions were easy to follow ;)