chuunin_archive | Oct. 21st, 2005

As I’ve mentioned around here before I currently live in Japan. So I thought I’d share a little insight as to what it’s like to be a Naruto fan on this side of the Pacific.

First of all, I can’t actually watch Naruto. Yeah, you read that right. Naruto is on TV Tokyo which is a station I don’t get. I didn’t get it when I lived in Sapporo two years ago either. In fact, I only get three channels and they almost never have anything good on. So TV in Japan is like what TV was like in America in the 1950’s in a lot of ways.

So here’s some brutal truth for you; first it’s not possible to watch Naruto in every home in Japan. Second, as a whole, Japanese TV both sucks and blows. I could go on a huge rant about that but that would be OT.

So let’s talk manga which I can get. There’s a used media shop right by where I do my grocery shopping and I’ve already picked up just over half the series there. Buying used is great because the shops won’t buy stuff that’s beat up and when you do the yen to dollar conversion I’m getting each volume for around $2.50. I also grabbed the three manga and anime fan guides which we’ll likely never see in English. This is a crying shame since they rock hard.

I’ve already completed the tournament part of the Chunin exams, the War of Sound and Sand, and Search for Tsunade arcs and have part of the Save Sasuke arc. I’ve actually picked up some good vocabulary words from reading these.

Now as for merchandise, I live in a small city (around 15,000 people) so they best I’ve been able to find here is a pack of bromide cards which weren’t all that impressive but did come with a very tasty stick of game the way sports cards back home used to.

The nearest large city is Kumamoto (I’m in Kyushu, FYI) which is slightly larger than Columbus, Ohio. Kumamoto has an Animate which is a really cool anime/manga specialty store chain. Sadly, the Kumamoto one isn’t as good as the one I went to in Sapporo. This one’s selection of video game merchandise is really lacking, the CD section is way too small and they don’t even have t-shirts.

But they do have lots of Naruto stuff. The coolest thing I’ve seen so far was Sasuke’s armbands. I thought about picking up the infamous Naruto ramen bowl, but getting it back to America unbroken would have been too hard so I passed. Of course there’s a big selection of cups, magnets, memo pads, buttons, calendars, pencils boards, mini-statues and just about anything you can imagine. I couldn’t find any headbands which really bummed me out. (I wanna be a Sand ninja!) Though I did find shopping bags with the Leaf and Itachi symbols on them.

I’m on a bit of a budget right now so I’ve had to keep my knickknack buying to a minimum. But I did grab a chibi-Sakura fridge magnet since it’s really cute and Sakura is my favorite Naruto character. Interestingly, in this magnet set all the characters’ name are written in English and Western style so my magnet says ‘Sakura Haruno’.

Oh, and before I forget you can actually buy the English editions of Naruto here too for only about $10. Kinokuya is a Japanese book store chain that always has a very nice selection of books and magazines in English and they have a manga section as well. I’m thinking of buying some English manga to show to my students. The kids at my junior high love Naruto though I’ve been keeping being a fan on the DL. I am supposed to be a teacher, after all.

Next, we come to capsule toys. You get these out of what look like big gumball machines for about $1 or $2 depending on the machine. I’ve grabbed chibi Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke, Gaara and Shikamaru from one without getting a repeat. The chibi-Sakura is coming with me when I go back to America for Christmas. I plan to hang her on my tree.

Now the chibis are pretty cool. But the best Naruto capsule toys are the diorama ones. They had the characters doing one of their special attacks! So far I’ve gotten Tsunade delivering a powerful punch, Kankuro with Karasu, and Naruto going Kyubi. They’ve got Temari doing Kamitachi, Sasuke doing Chidori and one other that I can’t recall at the moment. I think it might be Gaara.

Lastly, there are two Naruto novels out. I haven’t had much of a chance to look at them, but they cover at least up until the end of the Wave Country arc and use pages from the manga as pictures. I might grab those and the “Bleach” novels just to have them.

So there you have it. I hope you folks found that interesting.