Kamagaya Fanfest and Gachi Boy movie
I went to Kamagaya yesterday for the minor-league Fighters Fan Fest. I saw Kazuhito Tadano! And I wrote him a message in Japanese! And I signed up for the Fighters Fan Club, having met probably the only person in the Fighters' fan club staff that actually speaks fairly fluent English. (Go figure, why the heck was a dude from Hokkaido who went to college in Nebraska manning a fan club table in middle-of-nowhere Chiba?) It was weirder especially given that I am pretty sure I was the only foreign person I saw there all day.
Read my entire fan fest report on Marinerds if you want to know more and see my pictures from the event.
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the2belo was totally right in that I should have gotten there in the morning, though he said it was for the sake of buses and whatnot... in actuality it was that they only gave out or sold tickets for the special events in the morning. Doh! So no autographs or pictures with players for me :( Now I know for next time. I got up at my normal 10am and didn't get to Kamagaya stadium until almost 1:30, being as it takes almost two hours total to get there anyway, what with getting to the station on this end and getting to the stadium on the other end...
After the fanfest I came home and collapsed for a while, and then in the evening I went back out to Saitama Shintoshin. I got an avocado burger at Kua'Aina, and then I saw the movie Gachi Boy. It's about a skinny dorky Japanese guy who wants to become a pro wrestler, so he joins his college's pro wrestling club, and overcomes great odds to succeed! (But still can't quite do a dropkick.) What bugs me about this movie is -- from the trailers it totally looked like a comedy. Hell, it looked like a REALLY FUNNY COMEDY. But in actuality it's only like 40% comedy if that.
There's actually a VERY serious underlying plot point in that apparently, he used to be a genius until he was in a bicycle accident and hit his head... and now he has this problem where every morning, whenever he wakes up, he completely can't remember anything that has happened since the accident. Of course they don't reveal this for the first half of the movie so you mostly wonder why this guy keeps taking pictures of EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and writing memoes when people tell him things and he just seems plain strange and unable to memorize wrestling routines. Then there's an accident during a fight and he blanks out and his sister yells at him. Of course the only two people who find out about this problem are 1) the cute wrestling trainer girl who Igarashi totally has a crush on (but she likes another guy... which of course, naturally, Igarashi keeps forgetting to write himself a memo about) and 2) one of the other wrestling club guys who pretty much literally never speaks. And neither of these people let anyone else know about the secret, and of course Igarashi HIMSELF forgets that they both know.
They do some pretty freaky scenes where like... he wakes up in the morning and his room is filled with signs that say "GO READ YOUR DIARY ON THE TABLE" and then the diary is like this huge notebook saying "To my tomorrow self..." and it starts "Hi, you had a big bicycle accident in 2006 and you have selective amnesia. Ok. Anyway, this is your diary of everything that's happened since the accident..." and it's of course got photographs, notes, etc about his life and his friends and what he does and so on. It's really CHILLING when he's walking along reading his memo and has a photograph of the Wrestling Club building and gets there... thinks "aha, this is the place"... and walks in thinking that he's never met any of these people before, and of course they all greet him like an old friend and everything is just fine.
Apparently the reason he wants to be a pro wrestler is because... he can't remember things from day to day, but being a wrestler changes his body. He gets muscles, he gets bruises, etc, and somehow he actually remembers them. He figures that maybe some sort of muscle memory will help his condition. Whether or not this is the case is not quite certain, but...
Anyway, naturally when someone's entire memory is stored in A BOOK there are obvious problems that will come up. You know, like what happens when he forgets to write a memo in the book, or when the book falls apart, or when there's RAIN, or all of this other stuff. Or worse, when he falls asleep somewhere NOT home and doesn't have his book. Which is inevitably what happens and naturally he ends up in the middle of nowhere instead of at his wrestling match and his sister has to come rescue him and so on.
So I... laughed at the start of the movie but then it seemed pretty serious and even a little scary/depressing from then on in. I'm not disappointed that I watched it, but I'm a little sad that the trailer is so funny and gives no hint at the underlying seriousness. Also what's crazy is that the main female lead is played by actress Saeko... yeah, the same Saeko who is now married to Fighters ace pitcher Yu Darvish and who is going to have a baby like, SOON. But I don't think she was showing at all in this movie, which makes me wonder when it was filmed. Hmm. (She wasn't a wrestler in the movie, just the team trainer. I think that might have been kind of dangerous.)
On the way back from the movie there were a bunch of really loud foreigners on the train, very obivously drunk, some even holding cans of beer ON THE TRAIN, swearing at each other in English. My guess is they were British or European of some sort given the accents. The one guy was like "why won't you fuckers come sit down here with me?" and then went over and sat on the two people sitting on the other side. And then they were taking pictures of each other being drunk and loud. A lot of Japanese people were just sort of moving away from them and going to stand on other parts of the train. One of the foreigners said "man, we're a right set of bastards aren't we?" Another guy's like "Hahaha, none of these people understand what the fuck we're saying anyway," and one of the others said "actually there's a white girl sitting over there but she's fuckin' ignorin' us". I guess I'm just really glad they didn't come over and try to talk to me. I probably would have pretended I didn't understand English.
I came home and worked on my Fan Fest report, and slept. Whee.
Today I woke up and did laundry and ate curry rice. That's really about it. I'm going to go to GEOS in a bit and work on my intensive week schedule and then I'll head to Ikebukuro to meet up with Pau before he disappears again. Exciting, I know.
Read my entire fan fest report on Marinerds if you want to know more and see my pictures from the event.
the2belo was totally right in that I should have gotten there in the morning, though he said it was for the sake of buses and whatnot... in actuality it was that they only gave out or sold tickets for the special events in the morning. Doh! So no autographs or pictures with players for me :( Now I know for next time. I got up at my normal 10am and didn't get to Kamagaya stadium until almost 1:30, being as it takes almost two hours total to get there anyway, what with getting to the station on this end and getting to the stadium on the other end...After the fanfest I came home and collapsed for a while, and then in the evening I went back out to Saitama Shintoshin. I got an avocado burger at Kua'Aina, and then I saw the movie Gachi Boy. It's about a skinny dorky Japanese guy who wants to become a pro wrestler, so he joins his college's pro wrestling club, and overcomes great odds to succeed! (But still can't quite do a dropkick.) What bugs me about this movie is -- from the trailers it totally looked like a comedy. Hell, it looked like a REALLY FUNNY COMEDY. But in actuality it's only like 40% comedy if that.
There's actually a VERY serious underlying plot point in that apparently, he used to be a genius until he was in a bicycle accident and hit his head... and now he has this problem where every morning, whenever he wakes up, he completely can't remember anything that has happened since the accident. Of course they don't reveal this for the first half of the movie so you mostly wonder why this guy keeps taking pictures of EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and writing memoes when people tell him things and he just seems plain strange and unable to memorize wrestling routines. Then there's an accident during a fight and he blanks out and his sister yells at him. Of course the only two people who find out about this problem are 1) the cute wrestling trainer girl who Igarashi totally has a crush on (but she likes another guy... which of course, naturally, Igarashi keeps forgetting to write himself a memo about) and 2) one of the other wrestling club guys who pretty much literally never speaks. And neither of these people let anyone else know about the secret, and of course Igarashi HIMSELF forgets that they both know.
They do some pretty freaky scenes where like... he wakes up in the morning and his room is filled with signs that say "GO READ YOUR DIARY ON THE TABLE" and then the diary is like this huge notebook saying "To my tomorrow self..." and it starts "Hi, you had a big bicycle accident in 2006 and you have selective amnesia. Ok. Anyway, this is your diary of everything that's happened since the accident..." and it's of course got photographs, notes, etc about his life and his friends and what he does and so on. It's really CHILLING when he's walking along reading his memo and has a photograph of the Wrestling Club building and gets there... thinks "aha, this is the place"... and walks in thinking that he's never met any of these people before, and of course they all greet him like an old friend and everything is just fine.
Apparently the reason he wants to be a pro wrestler is because... he can't remember things from day to day, but being a wrestler changes his body. He gets muscles, he gets bruises, etc, and somehow he actually remembers them. He figures that maybe some sort of muscle memory will help his condition. Whether or not this is the case is not quite certain, but...
Anyway, naturally when someone's entire memory is stored in A BOOK there are obvious problems that will come up. You know, like what happens when he forgets to write a memo in the book, or when the book falls apart, or when there's RAIN, or all of this other stuff. Or worse, when he falls asleep somewhere NOT home and doesn't have his book. Which is inevitably what happens and naturally he ends up in the middle of nowhere instead of at his wrestling match and his sister has to come rescue him and so on.
So I... laughed at the start of the movie but then it seemed pretty serious and even a little scary/depressing from then on in. I'm not disappointed that I watched it, but I'm a little sad that the trailer is so funny and gives no hint at the underlying seriousness. Also what's crazy is that the main female lead is played by actress Saeko... yeah, the same Saeko who is now married to Fighters ace pitcher Yu Darvish and who is going to have a baby like, SOON. But I don't think she was showing at all in this movie, which makes me wonder when it was filmed. Hmm. (She wasn't a wrestler in the movie, just the team trainer. I think that might have been kind of dangerous.)
On the way back from the movie there were a bunch of really loud foreigners on the train, very obivously drunk, some even holding cans of beer ON THE TRAIN, swearing at each other in English. My guess is they were British or European of some sort given the accents. The one guy was like "why won't you fuckers come sit down here with me?" and then went over and sat on the two people sitting on the other side. And then they were taking pictures of each other being drunk and loud. A lot of Japanese people were just sort of moving away from them and going to stand on other parts of the train. One of the foreigners said "man, we're a right set of bastards aren't we?" Another guy's like "Hahaha, none of these people understand what the fuck we're saying anyway," and one of the others said "actually there's a white girl sitting over there but she's fuckin' ignorin' us". I guess I'm just really glad they didn't come over and try to talk to me. I probably would have pretended I didn't understand English.
I came home and worked on my Fan Fest report, and slept. Whee.
Today I woke up and did laundry and ate curry rice. That's really about it. I'm going to go to GEOS in a bit and work on my intensive week schedule and then I'll head to Ikebukuro to meet up with Pau before he disappears again. Exciting, I know.
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*another sigh, embarrassed by other people from my country*
Sorry you had to put up with that.