VR Zone Shinjuku: Top 3 Experiences

By Niall Magee

Last December I went to VR Zone Shinjuku, a virtual reality park in Tokyo, for the second time. It opened in July 2017 and will be closing in March of this year, but another location, VR Zone Osaka, opened last year on floors 8 and 9 of the Umeda HEP Five building. These theme parks are a part of “VR ZONE Project i Can” which is an initiative headed by game/toy company Bandai Namco to popularize virtual reality. It all started with a pop-up VR park that ran from April to October 2016 in Tokyo’s Odaiba district, near the famous giant Gundam statue.

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The Nightmare of Names

By Tim van Gardingen

What’s in a name? Or, in the case of Japan, what on earth is the name in the first place? I found out the hard way just how tricky a Japanese name can be.

Names are important. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have never forgotten a person’s name, even of those who he only ever met once. I assume the reporters meant twice, as with those he met only once, there’s no way to tell.  I can tell two things for certain from this: Lincoln understood the power of names, and Lincoln never had to learn the names of Japanese school children.

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Ehime Roadster

By Jennifer Cerna

Jen uses some colorful language in this month’s post, so if you find swearing offensive, look away now. 

I named her Pig, as a joke. I bought her almost a year ago, even going through the pain of raising my credit limit to get her. She is beautiful, in her own way, though I wish she were bigger. Her shiny black coat catches the last of daylight.

The weather is better now, so I can take her out for rides more often. I sweep the dust and spider webs off her. This is the part that I hate the most. My throat dries out and my awareness sharpens. I hope that I don’t find any arachnids hiding near the engine, under the splashguards, or in the wires that connect to the handles. God forbid that one crawls on my bare hands when I’m going almost twice the speed limit and there’s another car less than three feet to my right. As I continue inspecting, I have a flashback to last summer when I found a spider larger than my palm hiding in the cup holder. I peek in, my goose bumps feeling as though they are bulging, and see only an old leaf that fell last winter.

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