Monday, December 26, 2011

Merry Christmas! 圣诞节快乐!Selamat Hari Krismas! Joyeux Noël! メリークリスマス!

Okay, that's "Merry Christmas" in just about all the languages that I can type/ write it in. Lol. And in case that doesn't sufficiently convey my meaning; "Merry Christmas to everyone!"

It doesn't feel very Christmassy this year, I'll admit, what with the state of the world and everything, but I suppose you've got to be happy for the things that you do have.


Next up, Shinjiro's Christmas blogpost! I think he's been excited about Christmas (and the fact that Christmas is on a Sunday, his blog-day, which means he gets to blog about it) for ages, haha.


(-())V
20111225
 
メリクリ〜!!!!!

みんな、どんなクリスマスを過ごしてますかぁ〜??
俺は、直也くん家で、ひろやんと直也くんの友達とクリスマスパーティー中☆
(He was at Naoya's house having a Christmas party with Maekawa Hiroki and Naoya's friends; so cute, haha!)

一人じゃなくて、よかった(笑)

ってか、最近寒すぎて、朝起きるのがつらいよ〜!!今年東京雪降るかなぁ〜?ちょっと降ってほしいなぁ〜(^O^)
降ったら、雪だるま作りたい(笑)

ってか、もう次のblogの番の時2012やぁ〜!!
早い早い早い〜m(__)m
今年は早かったわ〜!!
来年は色々あるから、楽しみやぁ〜☆

写真は、この前のトークショーの後の握手会の時、実はちょっと早めの、サンタさんになりました(笑)
恥ずかしかった〜!!
(LOL. He was embarrassed that he had to wear the Santa suit...? Hm. Well, whose idea was it then, I wonder... haha.)
 
じゃみんな、良いお年を〜!
今日のMUSIC LOVERSとレコード大賞と紅白歌合戦見てなぁ〜☆
じゃまた来週!!

20111225.jpg


投稿者:與真司郎

Friday, December 23, 2011


Back in the office; my last day of work for the year!

Last lesson of Intermediate-2 went well last night - I scored highest in class for the test! Yaaaay!!! :D

I suppose 76/100 isn't bad, but I could've gotten about ten marks more if it hadn't been careless mistakes... Sigh. Ooh, but the section with particles! 8 out of 10! Double yay! My percentage for the particles section has never been that high before!

And then, some pictures of the after-party later, at Timbre@OldSchool:



Group photo, left-to-right: Terry, Eugene, Quan Heng (Lim-san, haha), CK, Kai, Trena, Philyn, Germaine, me, and Yamamoto-sensei!

Not everyone's carrying on to Intermediate-3, sadly - only about 6 of us and sensei says that maybe a couple of new students from other Inter-2 classes may join ours. But it's been a really fun 5 months with everyone! After finally taking a make-up lesson with another class 2 weeks ago, I love this class all the more. :D

是非、みんなにまた会いましょう!
木曜日のInt-2は最高でした!

Sunday, December 18, 2011

My dose of Shin-chan for the week. XD



(* ^)(o)
2011
1218

今日は名古屋に行って、トークショーしてきましたよ〜

いやぁ〜今日も話しまくったぁ〜!!
楽しすぎて、時間が過ぎるのが早すぎたぁ〜(^O^)
約束の写真





また来年もこういったものをできるように、俺もがんばらないと

ってか、もうちょいで、クリスマスやなぁ〜!!
早すぎる〜!!
俺何しようかなぁ〜?
仕事かな〜?
なかったら、友達大勢でパーティーかなぁ〜?!

みんなは誰と過ごすの??

そんで、クリスマスが終わったら、すぐレコード大賞と紅白歌合戦!!

今から楽しみ〜!!
AAA
の良さが一人でも多くの方に伝わるように、パフォーマンスしてくるね〜!!





このケーキの写真は、今日、なぜか急に、ちあきのお父さんとお母さんがトークショーに

遊びにきてくれました〜!(笑)
で、王冠のケーキを俺のために、持ってきてくれて(^O^)
ありがとう、おばちゃんとおっちゃん
おいしくいただきました
じゃまた来週!!

投稿者:與真司郎



Is it just me, or is the number of people who come for his talk shows increasing?? It really does look like that from all these photos he keeps posting. 大人気だよね、真ちゃん。

It's so cute that Chiaki's parents came for his event (since Chiaki's folks do live in Nagoya, after all) and they even bought him a cake! So cute, oba-san, oji-san. Haha.

Kind of reminds me of some of their backstage photos where their families bring or send them food. I remember seeing a photo which had a note saying, "senbei from Shuta's family! Help yourselves!" And there was another one where Naoya mentioned that "Shinjiro's onii-san (older brother) brought super yummy strawberries".

It's almost like their own family members have become part of some huge extended family. Oh, the oodles of warm fuzzy feelings. (^-^)

Monday, December 12, 2011

I just realised that this was my 300th tweet, which was posted yesterday.


"Rainy morning. Don't wanna get out of bed..." is what it says. XD


EDIT (21st May 2012):

Well, an anonymous person left a comment (the same comment posted on three different posts, really) to say that the grammar in this tweet is wrong:

DERU SHITA KUNAI IS WRONG GRAMMAR.

Make sure you do not displayed wrong grammar on the web. It is a disgrace.

Do not boast about being top in class when your grammar is below standard. Which Japanese school are you attending?

you should remove your picture and message from your blog. dont disgrace yourself with poor grammar



Since it's an anonymous comment, I can't reply to it directly. So in case that person decides to actually follow up and see if I do anything about their comment, I've decided to just reply here.

Well, it was a mistake. *shrugs* It happens when you're learning stuff, doesn't it?

I don't think it's a disgrace, actually. Because everybody has to learn somehow, so if anyone wants to laugh at my mistake, I'm fine with it. I was barely through Intermediate-2 classes at the time of this post, so there was still lots more to learn. :)

Also, if you would like to know what school I'm attending, I will tell you, but first, let me say this: do not judge the school by its students. There are plenty of classes with lots of other students, and I don't think I'm any kind of shining example of their academic excellence. Every school has good students and bad students; the teachers can only do the best that they can.

Me "boasting" about being top in class? Well, I scored the highest on a test; who wouldn't be happy about that? But this was a mark of just 76/100, in a class of nine students, myself included. 76% is average, to me. And nine students is really, really few people; any kind of scoring among so few people is not a benchmark for anything. If I could score full marks or something for the JLPT, then that would be something that I'd properly boast about.

I attended Bunka Language Private School (in Singapore, if you're not from here). Their pace is rather fast; not everyone can catch up. I consider myself lucky that I'm one of the few who was able to keep up, and as we went on to higher levels, juggling work, revision, homework and other things I do in my free time, I just barely managed to stay on top of things.

But my classes are over for now; I haven't started Pre-Advanced classes yet, and as of our final test in Intermediate-4, I was placed third in class. I could've scored about 10+ marks more if I'd memorised all the keigo forms, and actually placed first again, but hindsight is 20/20, and it's already over anyway. At least I still had an acceptable mark of 73%.

Thank you, anonymous, for your concern about me being disgraced by my poor grammar, but it's really quite all right. We all need to live and learn from embarrassing mistakes. :)
Because a Sunday is never complete (and it always makes a Monday so much better) without a blogpost from Shinjiro. And I'll even throw in a related tweet. I'm just generous that way, me.


Awww. Seems that he's very much a family kinda person. He always gets all excited over anything to do with his sister or his nephew, and now there's his mum too this time, all of them coming to Tokyo. But then again, he does seem quite excited about almost everything he tweets about... the only punctuation marks he ever uses in his tweets seem to be exclamation marks. Well, okay, he does use commas, but at the end of a sentence. He only! ever! uses! exclamation! marks!

Life is probably just that exciting for him, I suppose. Lol.



ε=ε=(∇≦)ノ
2011
1211

みんな寒さには耐えれてますか~??

暖房嫌いやけど、ついに寒すぎてつけてしまったm(__)m って言っても、ちょっとつけて、すぐ消すけど

そして、やっぱりこの季節は乾燥する!!喉も肌も!!手洗いうがいはホンマにちゃんと
やらないと!!

インフルエンザの予防接種はもうしたから、ちょっと安心!!

みんなも風邪だけは、気をつけようぜ~

そして、昨日まで実は、母親とお姉と甥っ子が京都から東京に遊びに来てたのです!!
りお(甥っ子)は初東京もう癒される~!!
前まで嫌われてたのに、今回でだいぶ仲良くなった!チューもしてくれるようになった~(笑)

写真は、俺が真剣にメールを打っていたところ、りおが膝の上に座りながら、俺のiphoneをいじってるところを、お姉が隠し撮り。
普通すぎてごめんね(笑)
可愛いでしょ??(笑)



投稿者:與真司郎



Ah, his little nephew is so cute.

And his sister takes the best photos. LOL.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

It's all over the news today, so if you don't already know that there was a total lunar eclipse last night, what rock do you live under? (Would you like me to flip it over for you and scrape you off the underside? XD)

So, after my event last night, Eunice had her show to run as well, and since hers was scheduled to be over and done with by 9pm, Keldren and Amy decided to hang around and wait for the people on her side, so we could go and have dinner.

While waiting, I go up to the office and start sorting out stuff, since I'm meant to be on leave until Wednesday (but it looks like I'll be making a short trip back to the office tomorrow to carry on sorting out some stuff... sigh). Wai Xin then tells me not one, but two things that I had never heard of:

1. Stage 1 of the Indoor World Archery Championships is being held in Singapore tomorrow (which means today, since this was told to me yesterday; more on that later).
2. There's a total lunar eclipse happening, like, NOW.


So, after Eunice's show was over, we (she, Jun Jie, Amy, Keldren and me) piled into Keldren's car and he drove down to Thomson for our favourite fried rice post-event supper/dinner. :D

While we were on our way there, Amy looked out the window and noticed that "the moon looks weird".

"Yeah," I said, "my friend told me just now that there's a total lunar eclipse happening tonight."

"So cool!"

Which then cues Eunice, Amy and me squishing over to look out the window on Amy's side, and then when the car turns, squishing over to my window, and then squeezing back to Amy's side when the car turns again. Rinse and repeat for the next 10 minutes. Add in a lot of, "It's here, it's here, I see it!" and, "There, there, see it's so small already!" and also, "Hello, moooon!!" (mostly Amy).

During our ride down to Thomson, we saw the moon go from being half-covered, to being mostly blotted out except for a small toenail-like sliver. Then we stood in the carpark where Keldren had parked for half an hour and watched it become fully covered and dark red .

I've seen pictures of blood moons, but it's so cool to finally see it actually happen.


Picture courtesy of Keldren, who had his DSLR with him at the time. :)



And now we come to today, and the Indoor World Archery Championships at Marina Bay Sands.

Seriously, no publicity at all. Dumb AAS. If Netball Singapore can splash out on publicity for the Nations Cup by placing ads on buses and stadiums, why couldn't AAS have done just a fraction of the same?! If you want the sport to grow, the first thing is generate an interest in it, no?

And the spectator turnout at the venue was dismal as well; probably because of the $30 admission fee. Because honestly, even if you had heard about the sport and were curious to come see it, if you didn't know anything about the sport and who was shooting, $30 might kill your interest pretty fast, wouldn't it?

Anyway, we arrived about halfway through the individual knockout rounds, and we saw the Bronze medal matches for both recurve and compound, men's and women's. Bit of a shame that Si Lie lost at the men's recurve bronze medal match, but the Singaporean girl (I forgot her name, oops) shooting for the women's compound bronze medal won her match. It was kind of scary to watch her shoot, because she was so skinny, and looking at her, you honestly wouldn't think that she could draw a bow, but she CAN and she's pretty damn stable too.

Women's recurve bronze medal match: a girl from Chinese Taipei against a lady from... oh dear, I can't remember the country. All I remember is that it was a Caucasian lady. Haha. The Chinese Taipei girl was awesome to watch. She started out a little slow on her first end, shooting 8s and a 9, while the other lady had a perfect score, but after that, her opponent faltered and she came back, shooting at least two 10s in every end; the Chinese Taipei girl won in the end.

Finally, the two recurve gold matches. These two matches alone made it totally worth the $30 paid for entry.

Women's recurve gold: two Chinese Taipei girls. So once that other girl had won the bronze medal, Chinese Taipei had secured all three top positions for recurve. Amazing. And even more amazing was that during the gold medal match, both girls were shooting at least two 10s in each end, if not perfect scores. Up till this point, the spectators would usually clap every time a 10 was scored, but 10s became so common in this match that no one really clapped anymore! LOL. They eventually tied and went into a shootout, but that match was awesome.

Men's recurve gold: one guy from Chinese Taipei against a French guy whom I didn't like very much because I found his attitude annoyingly uppity. At this point, the other Chinese Taipei supporters around us suddenly became very vocal and supportive of their teammate (they weren't even this encouraging - some of them weren't even awake - when their female teammate was shooting against the other Caucasian lady... WTH?? -_-), shouting encouragement when he was drawing, and cheering when he scored a good shot.

French guy didn't start off too hot. Chinese Taipei guy was sort of okay. Both guys drew in the first end, but while the Chinese Taipei guy continued to perform well, French guy couldn't keep up and lost every end after that. So Chinese Taipei won both the recurve men's and women's titles.

We scooted off after that, as we weren't too interested in the compound matches, and we were kind of starving. Fred and I hadn't had breakfast or lunch, and Wai Xin and Weiquan hadn't had lunch either. We'd arrived at the competition at about 1.30pm, see, so it was kind of a weird timing in between breakfast and lunch.

So, since we were in MBS, we had TWG for tea! \(^-^)/  Ah, the happiest point of the whole day. o(^▽^)o

Friday, December 09, 2011

Soo... I managed to download Shinjiro's second photobook, the one that was a limited edition thing, and which, according to that interview he gave, apparently has nude shots. (But there aren't that many, really; most of the book seems composed of clothed or just topless shots.)

Thing is, it really is quite tastefully done; I like the pictures (no, it's not just because he's in them; there're some of the Shanghai skyline as well, since that's where the setting of the "story" for the photobook is), but more than that, I love the text that they're paired with. There's a very subtle storyline that goes together with the pictures, and the first-person narration of the text, combined with the lovely photos, is what I really love about this.

There was that Tokyohive article where Shinjiro described the photobook as the story of "a young boy who matures after being trained by an older woman". I was kind of "Umm... what?!?" at that, because really, am I the only one who thinks that sounds more like "young boy corrupted by older woman"...? LOL.

So, was a bit wary of what I'd find in the pictures, although I was curious to see them.
(I'm not posting any of the pictures here. I found them in an online fan community which only grants access to it to its members, so as a matter of courtesy, I'm not reposting.)

What I found was kind of unexpected, but in a good way. I'm not sure about the boy (which is how I'll refer to him from here on, because it honestly doesn't feel like Shinjiro in the book; it's more like he's just modelling for the role) being "trained", but the little bits of text interspersed among the very beautiful pictures make it seem more like the story of  an older woman and a younger man who like each other, but seem to have a strange roundabout way of expressing it. Or not expressing it.

There're pictures of the boy in a dingy kitchen, a just-barely-modest living room, and text which says that he grew up in these kinds of working-class surroundings. And it was here that he came to like a woman, a foreigner.

And that mention of the environment which the boy grew up in kind of reminds me of those lines in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India", when I was studying it for A Levels. The exact lines escape me, since I last touched the book some 8 years ago, but it ran somewhere along the lines of how beauty could sometimes be found in the most rural, primeval, bare-essential of places, where one would least expect it.

And that seems to be the story of this photobook, to some extent.
(As practice for myself, I translated the text that I could make out from the pictures.)

An older high-society woman from another country, who seems to have found an unexpected love in a younger man of a poorer background, in this new land that she's come to. They don't say it, but there's a chemistry that drives them together, which prompts her to bring him to these high-class hotels with panoramic city views from their windows, and which makes him actually turn up there, dressed in suits which he most probably didn't buy on his own.

「ここで、待っていてもいい?」
"Can I wait for you here?"

彼と出会うずっと前から、男にそうされることを望んでいた。
Before I met him, I'd always wished for a man like this.

It shows in the way that her hands with her dark-red-lacquered nails touch his face, and the way that he smiles at her. But they don't say it openly. And maybe they both just remain as some kind of hope for the other, a kind of hope for a different kind of life.

ぼくもいつか、飛ぶ。
Someday, I will fly.

Someday, maybe he will. And maybe so will she.

Such is the beauty of things that are not said.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Attended make-up lesson for my Intermediate-2 Lesson 7 yesterday, since I won't be able to attend the class on Thursday coz I have to manage an event on that day.

There were only 6 people in the class that I joined. Who were pretty quiet. I love my class so much more now; there're like 10 of us and we're always constantly talking, haha. There was even this one guy (Really, *one* guy. The other five were ladies.) who didn't seem to know anything. I mean, come on, it's Intermediate *TWO* level. Don't waste your money if you can't catch up.

This teacher's (Takatsuka-sensei) way of teaching is quite different from Yamamoto-sensei's; he talks a lot more, and almost all of it in Japanese. Which I found quite fun, since I could still understand most of it, but his own students seemed kinda... lost.

先生の話し方は。。。ちょっとわかり難いかもしれないな、あの生徒たちという。

I learned quite a bit of new vocabulary today though, so I'm happy! :D

And to start the class off, Takatsuka-sensei gave us a tongue twister (I wonder if he does this for every lesson?): 買った赤肩たたき器高かった。(katta aka kata tatakiki takakatta.) Say it three times, as fast as you can! :D

Literal translation: The red shoulder massage machine (or "gadget", if you prefer) that I bought was expensive.

来週山本先生のクラスに帰ります!(^-^)

Monday, December 05, 2011

Another stolen blogpost. XD
Shinjiro meets Koike Teppei for a belated birthday dinner. So cute.



(・┏┓・)
20111204
 
こんばんみ〜☆
(I asked my Japanese teacher about this phrase. Apparently, it's not Kansai-ben. It's just someone trying to sound cute. Shinjiro acting cute = oodles of squee-ness. XD)
もう知ってるとは思いますが、紅白歌合戦今年もAAA出場させていただきます!!
ホンマにホンマに応援してくれてる、ファンのみなさんのおかげです(^O^)
120%パフォーマンスするので、みんな見てやぁ〜!!

とにかく今年の目標は、楽しむ☆
ってか、最近寒くなってきたなぁ〜!!いややぁ〜(笑)
でもオシャレできるし、やっぱり冬も好きかも(笑)
今日の晩飯は久しぶりに小池徹平兄さんと、ちゃんこ鍋〜!!誕生日やってくれて、ナイスなワインまでプレゼントしてくれた〜☆さすがやわ!!ありがとう!てっちゃん(^O^)
(Can I just say how absolutely adorable it is that he actually calls Koike Teppei "
nii-san"?? Hahaha. And "Te-chan" too!!)


じゃまた来週!!
DVC00221_ed.jpg

投稿者:與真司郎