My blog is at jori.wordpress.com

I am using wordpress.com as my blog:

http://jori.wordpress.com

Last weekend my wife and I went to the Studio Ghibli Musuem in Tokyo (website, sorry mostly in Japanese). The museum is dedicated to the animation studio of Miyazaki Hayao, Studio Ghibli. The museum is located in Mitaka no mori, a more "rural" area of Tokyo that has some nice greenery and parks and a more relaxed atmosphere than in central Tokyo.

The museum only opened a few years ago and is quite popular such that tickets are sold for entrance at specified time blocks (i.e. 10am, 12pm, 2pm, etc). Tickets become available for one month advance booking on the 10th of each month. I bought tickets from an electronic kiosk in Lawson (a convenience store chain in Japan).

The museum was quite impressive. There were so many things to look at and capture one's attention. In particular, there is tremendous attention paid to detail in recreating Miyazaki's "workshop". The main exhibit outlined the process of creating the anime, from imagination, to storyboard, to animation. Side exhibits featured the animated series from the 70's Heidi, and featured some really nice demonstrations of how still images or figures can come to life by various stroboscopic effects. Since the museum is popular among kids, I was able to understand most of the written explaination in Japanese (there was no English explaination). It wasn't necessary to understand Japanese to appreciate the exhibit, however, as the visual displays and atmosphere are worth the admission fee.

Incidentally, I made a new friend (picture above) with one of the characters from Tenku no Shiro (Castle in the Sky).

... Japanese to come ... (日本語は準備中！)

My "old" blog

I sort of had a blog on myspace.com here. However, myspace isn't so blog friendly and has troubles processing Japanese (i.e. it either garbles the text or will decide to eat half the post, likely because it is confused into thinking that the Japanese text is some html code). I eventually gave up on myspace, so I decided to start a proper blog on blogspot.

一応前ブログをmyspace.comでやっていた（ここ）。ですが、myspaceはブログをするのにしては不便だし日本語を入力する時には文字化けになったり、ポストが消えてしまったりすることもあるからmyspaceのブログをやめてちゃんとのブログをblogspot.comですることにしました。

Hello World! こんにちは、ブログへどうぞ！

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

こんにちは、ブログへ我のようこそ。

I am a U.S. citizen currently living in Tokyo, Japan. I had been meaning to start a blog ever since arriving in Japan last June. Now I'm finally starting one.

僕は現在に東京に住んでいるアメリカ人です。６月に来日してからずっとブログを始めようと思っていました。やっと始めます。

I'll attempt to make it bilingual (or multilingual) as much as possible so that I can also use this opportunity to practice my written Japanese as well. Of course, making the blog multilingual has the extra added benefit of increased accessibility for the reader. ;-)

日本語を書くことを特訓するためにこのブログをできるだけバイリンガルにしようとすることにしました。もちろんバイリンガルならこのブログが日本人に対して楽になるでしょうかね。　＊笑顔＊

I'll use this as a web log (or "blog", if you will, haha) to chronicle my experiences living "abroad", various musings, etc, and as a general diary for posterity.

このブログ（またはブログだ：「ウェブ・ログ」の書略だ）を記録にして色んな海外で住む体験や思い出などを保つように、または意見を表すように、使います。

My first blog post

This is only a test. Hopefully more will follow. Hopefully.

Test of Japanese: 日本語は大丈夫でしょうか。