We Are The Champions!!

Posted on April 22, 2009 by tokyofox

I raced home from work last Monday night (April 13th) to catch the end of Leicester versus Leeds United on Sky which was streamed live on live footy doctor. It culminated with a fantastic finale which, coupled with Peterborough’s defeat later that night, effectively ensured promotion for the Foxes.

The 20 minutes action I saw was surprisingly of very good quality but it wasn’t until last weekend that the League One title and promotion was ensured after a 2-0 win at Southend. I took the cowards option and avoided the first half by going running and it paid its dividends as we scored both goals within 15 minutes of me logging on to the internet on my return.

To celebrate(?) I have been doing a gap-fill listening exercise in some of my classes of the Queen song “We are the champions‘ (everything these days can relate to something I do in class it seems!) which is based around the students filling in the gaps with the relevant preposition and particle words such as after, on, to, through, of and so on.

I’m certainly no fan of Queen but the aforementioned song does have a little place in my heart as it blared out of the sound system in May 1996 after our last minute extra time winner in the Play Off Final. The irony of the situation was that we weren’t champions and in fact finished 6th in that season but we sure felt like champions on that day having won at the home of football in such dramatic fashion.

Posted in English Teaching, Leicester City, Music, Sport | Tagged , | 2 Comments

TF Film Review: Slumdog Millionnaire (2008)

Posted on April 15, 2009 by tokyofox

I’d never even heard of ‘Slumdog Millionnaire‘ before it won a load of Academy Awards a few months ago. It’s not even came out in Japan yet but I did manage to watch it a couple of weeks ago on the internet and was glad to see that it did live up to its hype. I really enjoyed it and it was interesting to see the slums of India; a country which I visited back in June 2007.

‘Who wants to be a millionnaire?‘ is shown in the same format in many countries around the world including Japan and I often use the theme tune in lessons as well as saying “final answer?” which is said in English on the Japanese version and is well known and gets a cheap laugh every time. Of course most people don’t realise that the programme originates from the UK.

Watching the films scenes on the quiz show set reminded me of my own experiences on the Australian version of Millionnaire back in 2001. No, I wasn’t a contestant but I was an audience member and along with my friends Richard and Jo we were directly behind the presenter and appeared on screen each time his face was shown which was most amusing to me at the time.

It was a celebrity episode (not that I knew the majority of the Aussie celebrities – basically there was no-one on there from Neighbours or Home & Away!) and so they filmed two episodes in one day which was so tiring by the end of it. Its difficult to clap with enthusiasm after a certain amount of time plus we had to move to the back for the latter episode to make it look like it was live with a different audience as eagle-eyed viewers do notice these things.

I even fluked all the ‘ask the audience’ questions right but then again I even managed to go on a bit of a run the first time I saw the Japanese one which was made even more difficult by the fact that I couldn’t understand nor read the questions and multi-choice answers!

Tokyo Fox Rating 9/10

Posted in Films, TV Shows | Leave a comment

The Police Are Off-Beat!

Posted on April 7, 2009 by tokyofox

Walking home last last week having missed the last train I was stopped by a policeman. Drunk and disorderly I wasn’t. Instead I was stopped for the terrible crime of crossing a deserted minor road (no it wasn’t Letsby Avenue!) when the green man wasn’t flashing.

Before he even said anything I knew he was gonna tell me off for taking the five steps it took to cross a road that one would otherwise have to wait three minutes to cross. He started muttering something about “aka shingo” (red light) which I refused to react to in Japanese as that can sometimes make things worse and they are more likely to just give up if they can’t communicate with you.

Instead, I just said “no cars” in English and pointed to the road but he just continued to come out with the same words in Japanese. Not wanting to waste any more time I decided to swallow my pride, said “gomen” (Sorry) and just walked off. He never stopped me but it is just one example of how most police have nothing better to do in Japan.

Now I don’t know if its illegal to j-walk in this country (maybe it is) as the Japanese tend to stick to all rules. Nothing wrong with that but the circumstances in which I was stopped seemed a bit extreme given the time and place. Its not as if I was crossing a busy road whilst dodging cars!

The police in this relatively safe country only really seem to give directions and stop cyclists to make sure their bike has been registered under the users name (a law in Japan) which is no doubt a better situation than having them chasing and shooting criminals in the streets! On the other hand, ask them to catch the person who killed a foreign teacher working in Japan and they seem so reluctant to do it!

Posted in Japan Life | 1 Comment

I’ve Got A New Phone!

Posted on March 31, 2009 by tokyofox

Finally moved into the modern age a couple of weeks ago by swapping my phone for something a bit more modern. When I bought my old one four years ago it was the very latest phone on the market but in an ever-changing market it wasn’t long before it became dated.

In the present day that phone was considered ancient and the network carrier changed name from Vodafone to Softbank ages ago so it was high time I traded it in. The old one had a TV function on it which I rarely used (as mentioned in a previous post, Japanese TV is not so interesting to non-Japanese people) so I didn’t bother getting such a feature on the new lighter model.

The Japanese are aboslutely obsessed with their mobiles and the trains, for example, are full of people playing with their phones. While I do a bit of that myself I only really ever use the e-mailing function (the equivalent of text messaging in the western world) while occasionally having a dabble with the camera and inevitably a few calls have to be made.

As a result I changed to a cheaper plan which will hopefully save me a bit of money in the credit crunch era. I thought it would be fairly simple to change my phone for they actually sent me a letter saying I could change it for free as the old model was so out-of-date.

As always though in Japan, it took an age to do this while we went through the lengthy process of confirming all details to an almost-tedious extent. The guy was of course nice enough and as much as I love the service in this country I do sometimes wonder why it takes them so long to ‘make the sale’ as it gets tiring listening to them go through every possible detail and then repeat the process again to confirm. Maybe I am being a bit harsh but I don’t know why some of these transactions take around an hour.

 
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Kung Fu Panda Special Lesson

Posted on March 21, 2009 by tokyofox

Kung Fu Panda was the surprise hit of last year for me as I originally thought it was some horrible cutesy cr*p aimed at the Japanese market. I saw it on the plane last summer when I went to Malaysia and again when I went to Laos via Bangkok as I was so tired that I fell asleep with 20 minutes left the first time I watched it.

While at home at Christmas I bought a cheap Kung Fu Panda annual in the sales which inspired me to use some of the material inside it as part of my special Kung Fu Panda lesson recently. Having photocopied many pictures of Po (the star of the film), and a maze, word-search and ‘cut out’ mask I went about constructing a special fun-packed animal lesson loosely based around some of the units in the kids books.

      

I never do craft work in kids lessons as I have always been of the opinion that in regular lessons it is bit of a cop-out when they are there to learn, practice and produce English via a wide variety of activities and games. However, I guess there’s a time and place for craft work and as a couple of my groups were ahead of pacing I decided to allow them to make a panda poster one week (using the target language of the recent units) and then a mask the following one which was worn while playing the ‘fishing for animals’ magnet game (see pictures to get the idea!)

 

On top of that I also incorporated some of my personal items into the lesson such as any random animal photos I have (i.e. me holding a crocodile, me and Gromit the dog, swimming with fish, riding an elephant, Jaws, an Okinawan buffalo, my ‘Pringles’ duck impression and so on), my frog ‘croaking’ guiro-type thing, my Aussie magnets, coasters and cork hat.

Special ‘Fu Juice’ was on the menu in one of the lessons which was basically just a bottle of green tea with a new label on it. The kids were fooled up until they tasted it! I also shared out some cheap animal biscuits which had the written English word on them which was a chance to re-enforce their phonics and not just me trying to buy popularity!! Overall, the students seemed to enjoy these special themed lessons and I will now keep an eye out to see how I can shoehorn other such film related things into my lessons.

Posted in English Teaching, Films | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Terrible Terebi

Posted on March 13, 2009 by tokyofox

Terebi is the butchered up way in which the Japanese say television and having been subjected to such viewing over the years I have to say that TV programmes in this country are among the world’s most dumbed down television.

It seems that a large percentage of Japanese TV features a studio audience on a garish-coloured set going crazy about some ‘tarento‘ (talent or celebrity) eating what looks like fairly average food (surprising given the fine nature of Japanese cuisine) and inevitably squealing out the word “oishii” (delicious). Is there really no other way to describe it? It would appear not and on top of that it doesn’t even tell you much, if anything about the taste of the food.

If that spectacle isn’t enough to test ones patience, then bright, flashing kanji captions appear willy-nilly throughout often accompanied by unnecessary sound effects. Furthermore, so many shows constantly feature a little box in the corner where the reactions of Japanese celebrities’ faces can be seen.

Sure, there’s a time and place for this kind of thing but its almost constant throughout the Japanese TV network. I think I remember reading somewhere recently that Japanese need to feel the empathy the audience is feeling to enjoy the television event whereas westerners can make up their own reactions to such things. Not sure if thats correct but there’s probably an element of truth in it.

With all this dire tripe served up on Japanese TV I am so glad that I have cable TV which is far from perfect but its an improvement. I guess though, that as time progresses, that TV will be viewed less and less with the internet taking over. I already watch more on internet sites like YouTube and project free-tv and with football being streamed live on sites like iraqgoals there will be very little, if no room in my life for Japanese terebi. I won’t miss it!

Posted in Japan Life, Quirky Japan, TV Shows | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Bored Of Snowboarding In Hakuba?

Posted on March 2, 2009 by tokyofox

Having had flu for over a week before my trip I was very apprehensive about myself and Ethan’s yearly trip to Hakuba and it’s fair to say that it wasn’t the most succesful trip but not due to any argument between us. We got on fine as always but I somehow lost my ski-lift pass after the first day and had to fork out 5000 yen for a new one day pass which I wasn’t happy about as we were trying to cut costs this year by staying at a cheaper hotel down the road from the resort rather than staying on site like we did last year and the year before.

On top of that weather conditions were fairly sh*te on the Friday after a very promising start. It was great for the first hour between eight and nine with nice powdery snow but went downhill after that. It then became very rainy, cold and windy resulting in the main gondola being closed which meant the courses we could use were very limited which resulted in us calling it a day slightly earlier than usual at 3pm.

Back at the hotel the two of us then shared a hot bath which is such a Japanese tradition and not a homosexual free-for-all. These baths may be immensely popular with the locals but we lasted only a few minutes before giving up.

After a short nap (much needed after very little sleep on the overnight bus journey) we decided to forego dinner (probably a good idea given the tiny meal we were served up for breakfast the following morning) and went into town as Ethan was desparate to return to the Mexican restaurant we visited last year but certainly not to try the aptly named ‘death’ sauce again! After a not-so-amazing meal we then had to run through the sludgy streets to catch the last bus back to our hotel as one bus didn’t stop for us outside the restaurant as we had expected it would.

 

The Saturday morning was also frustrating as the gondola didn’t open for a while and when it did it always had long queues. Also, the second mountain link was closed until the early afternoon for no justifiable reasons it seemed as the weather conditions were very good. To be honest, the trip was not such a disaster but we might have to think again when it comes to choosing our next snowboarding destination.

 
Posted in Action & Adventure, Japan Travel | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Finally Got My Hands On The F-Cup Cookie

Posted on February 18, 2009 by tokyofox

Given that I don’t take much notice of the local media my news about Japan still comes from external sources and quite often the things that I hear about Tokyo are completely new to me. The international media tends to only focus on the weird and (not-so) wonderful things to come out of Japan which usually revolves around very silly Japanese TV game shows (which I never see) or fairly useless innovations.

One such example was ‘F-Cup Cookie’ (read by some as f*ck up cookie, I kid you not!) which were heavily talked about on Scott Mills’ excellent BBC Radio One show back in December 2007. These are special cookies which are supposed to enhance womens breasts which, given the fact that the Japanese (if I can generalise for a moment!) are not so well endowed in that department, you would have thought would maybe be popular among the millions of overly-fashion conscious Tokyo girls.

Typically, I never saw such products on sale anywhere until finally I came across them the other day in one of the chain drug stores. About 750 yen for a box of 14 and by taking two a day a girls bust size supposedly increases which is exactly what Scott Mills put to the test which can be seen here in this video.

Being the romantic that I am I gave them to my girlfriend for her birthday the other week. In my defence, I should say that she did know about them beforehand and knew that it was a joke and that I was not implying anything by giving them to her. Furthermore, I would also like to add that I bought her a silver necklace, flowers, card and a t-shirt and made her a photo frame. I also took her out on both the Saturday and Sunday night so hopefully she will remember all that rather than the aforementioned cookie.

   
Posted in Food & Drink, Hentai, Japan Life | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Not The Best Way To Get A-Head In Life!

Posted on February 10, 2009 by tokyofox

A couple of years ago I was featured on Keikotomanabu website and just this last month I have appeared in the magazine made by the same company which one of my students works for. However, you may have to look closely at the photo below to see yours truly as it is only the back of my head which is shown. Some would say that that is my best side!!

The fact is that the article is all about one of my schools students (not mine though) and I was chosen due to me being the only one in the school at that time back in November. My out-of-focus head was just used for some arty-farty photograph technique and not surprisingly most of my students failed to notice it when I showed them the magzine!

Posted in English Teaching | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

TF Film Review: Quantum Of Solace (2008)

Posted on February 6, 2009 by tokyofox

Here it is then – a review of a film which came out in November last year apart from the fact that it has only just been released here in Japan. These delayed releases really are annoying as you can basically get the movie on download before it comes out here. I know that promotion and subtitling can take time but if some films have a worldwide release date then surely so can most others, especially ‘Quantum of Solace‘ which is even distributed by Sony who are of course a Japanese company.

 

I was very late to get into the Bond franchise with ‘Tomorrow Never Dies‘ (1997) being the first one I saw in its entirety and from then I on I was hooked and over the years I have made the effort to see many of the others, both new and old. I even went to James Bond Island near Phuket (featured in 1974’s ‘The Man With The Golden Gun‘) which was a highlight at the time for me and Ethan.

Having bought my ticket in advance (its 500 yen cheaper and also included a free bottle of Coca Cola Zero zero 7) I got up early last week for the 10am showing before work. I’d been doing my best to avoid any article or TV report about the film but couldn’t help but hear that it was now more similar to the excellent Bourne films and that was constantly in my mind as I watched some of the opening scenes which were reminiscent of ‘The Bourne Ultimatum‘ (2007) in my opinion but I guess that film franchise also borrowed heavily from Bond.

Overall, I enjoyed the action parts of the film, the Latin-American scenery and just looking at Olga Kurylenko who is one of the best looking Bond girls in my opinion. I can’t really explain it plot-wise (luckily so for those who haven’t seen it yet!) but that’s never been such an important thing for me. Of course its difficult to re-boot a franchise so soon after it was initially done and so it was always going to struggle to match the exploits of  ‘Casino Royale’ (2006) but I thought it was still quite good and continued the story of its predecessor which is rare in 007 films. As much as I like Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Bond I do miss the little things which made 007 iconic such as the gadgets, quips and memorable lines.

Tokyo Fox Rating 7/10

You can see my ‘Casino Royale’ filming locations here and here.

Posted in Films, James Bond | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments