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Because I only teach an average of about 4 hours a day, I have a lot of spare time. And because it only takes five minutes to make rice and ten seconds to open canned fruit (the two dietary staples I have been living off for the past month or so), and my apartment is so small that it doesn`t really accumulate the filth and grime I usually endow upon my habitations , cooking and cleaning don`t take up much time, either. So I read a lot, and go biking a lot, and rent a lot of movies.
There is a Tsutaya, which is like the Japanese version of Roger`s, a block away from my place. I got a membership as soon as I arrived, but it wasn`t until my dad purchased a little DVD player when my family was visiting that I ever used it. Now I usually rent three or four movies a week.
But I have to say that I have found the video store even more difficult to navigate than the grocery store.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, 98% of North American movies have been given Japanese names. These are usually pretty close to the what our titles would be (with some exceptions: `The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys` is now `The INNOCENT Lives of Altar Boys`, all the James Bond pictures start with `007:`...etc.), except written in kanji/katakana. The Japanese language, for those who don`t know, is phonetic, and organized so that there is never any sound that ends with a consonant (from what I understand, anyway - I`m sure there are exceptions). What this means is that you can`t have the word `Ghost`, because it ends in a consonant; it becomes, phonetically, `ghost-o`. But what it comes down to is that it`s all in Japanese. Which is what is printed on the side of the DVD and VHS cases. Which I can`t read.
Thankfully, sometimes there are the little icons of the stars on the sides, so I can sometimes navigate by these. Normally, however, I have to pull out shelves and shelves of videos to find what I`m looking for.
But that`s not all. Because even if the titles were subtly changed, I would normally be able to go through alphabetically and find what I`m looking for. Even if it was arranged according to the Japanese phonetic alphabet, it wouldn`t be that difficult.
But for some strange reason that I don`t understand, Japanese video stores arrange their movies by subject. And I don`t mean the genres, like `romance,` `horror`, etc. I mean specific subjects about what the movie is about.
There is a shelf for war movies. There is a shelf for natural disaster movies. There is a shelf for movies about jail breaks. There`s one for movies with protagonists with disabilities, there`s one for movies about characters who have been wrongfully accused, there`s one for sad movies about couples who break-up. There are TWO shelves for coming of age movies - one for young kids and one for teenagers and young adults. Now the categories aren`t labelled, so I have to guess, but I`m pretty sure there`s a shelf for bad Richard Gere movies, too.
This makes looking for specific videos really, really, really difficult. I was looking for `The Shawshank Redemption,` and was baffled. It wasn`t in the jail break section, wasn`t in the `based on a book by Stephen King` section, it wasn`t even on the `man goes through an ordeal and becomes a changed person` shelf. It`s one of the most rented films of all time, but man, I`m still looking for that bloody movie.
And finally, there is a very different way of returning your movies. In North America we are spoiled; we can drop them through a slot in the door if we`re in a hurry, or if we have time we can step inside and leave it on the desk. Not so here. You have to wait in a specified line-up to drop off your tape or DVD, which is often rather long. When they finally get to you, they check the DVD for scratches, double check it with your return stub, scan it through the computer, and then they let you go.
I was ignorant of this for the first week, and made the mistake of dropping my video on the counter and walking out. They fined me 500 yen, or about $6 Canadian, for that little error. No kidding.
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