Last week in Ozu Kikuyo

Yello Everybody,

Today it's time for my week post, this past week was my last week in Ozu Kikuyo school(furthest of the 2 Kumamoto schools, 30 minutes by train and 5 minutes walk). The week went well and was a lot of fun, I did a bare minimum of book work and concentrated on making the lessons as fun as possible for the students. As with the week in Okuchi, I gave the young kids a body figure to color and the older kids a manga, as well as handing out a goodbye card and the gift of an Australian sticker. Unlike Okuchi however at Ozu Kikuyo I have a few JR classes(Jr high students, who have a decent basic english knowledge), for these classes, I turned almost the entire lesson into a time of fun with music(Australian music from CDs I brought with me, Jet, the Waifs, Missy Higgins, Eskimo Joe, Hilltop Hoods and so on), and games, this didn't mean that we weren't doing a class though because in the process of playing the games we utilized english and I also tried to encourage conversation in english.
I felt really touched when a few of my students gave me good bye cards/letters and even gifts, one girl gave me a hand towel with the lucky white neko with gold coin figure on it(white cat sitting on it's hindlegs with one paw up and one ontop of a large gold piece sitting between it's legs, it's a common good luck symbol) and the Kanji for happiness, a pare of young siblings also gave me a pink rose each(pink for friendship), which made me look a bit strange returning home from school with a pair of roses, however I was very grateful for the thought. I won't name the students(they are customers of the company and i've signed a non-disclosure agreement and all of that), but everyone whether they gave me gifts or not will be missed, many of my favorite students are/were at Ozu Kikuyo.

This coming week I've got a staff meeting, followed by a 2 day training seminar(which while i'm being paid for it and it is important, seems a massive waste of time for me seeing I only have 2 weeks and very little classes remaining).

The images today are one of the pair of roses I was given as a parting gift, and one of the Ozu Kikuyo classroom.

Japan: Travelling Long Distance

Yellow Everybody,

Today in my series of small things about Japan, I thought I would do a short post on travelling around Japan and the cheapest ways to do it. This is particularily relevent to me since once I finish I have a week or so holiday time and a budget to consider.

In terms of transport over long distances, there are Trains(called Densha in Japanese), trains for the most part come in 3 varieties: the 1st and cheapest is the basic local trains, they are slow and stop at every station but they are cheap and by catching connecting trains and the like it is possible to get just about anywhere in Japan on the local trains(if you have the patience and the time), the 2nd is the limited express trains, these trains are much faster than local trains and have less stops, however they run on the same train lines as the local trains and thus to travel long distances you have to live with delays and multiple train changes, the 3rd and final is the shinkansen(also known as the bullet train), these trains are very fast, only stop at major cities and use their own seperate lines(there are 3 main shinkansen groups in central Japan: the fastest is the nozomi, the 2nd is the hikari and the 3rd is the kodomo, all 3 are very fast but there is a difference and it is reflected in the price, the nozomi is also the one train line you can't travel on with a JR Pass(international unlimited travel pass for Japan Rail, very useful for visiters to Japan)). As an example to get to Tokyo from Kumamoto by local train costs about $140(14000 yen) and would take about a day and a half non stop with almost 20 transfers and a 6 hour wait in a train station(local trains stop usually just before midnight and start around 5 or so), To get to Tokyo by shinkansen costs about $250(25000 yen) and only takes about half a day(quicker on the nozomi), Limited express is somewhere between the 2.

There are also national small aircraft(smaller planes which only travel inside Japan and not internationally), these range in price depending on destination and distance. Generally it's cheaper to take the shinkansen as opposed to flying, a flight from Kumamoto to Tokyo for instance takes about 4 hours and costs about $350(35000 yen)(which is not bad at all for a flight). Of course the problem with airlines is even if they are quicker and you can afford the additional cost, you also have to take into account the costs to transport you and your luggage to and from the hotels(by taxi or if you are lucky by bus or train), something which isn't always cheap since airports are generally situated on the outskirts of cities.

The 3rd and cheapest option for long distance travel is by highway bus, there a number of regular buses between cities, which run both day and also as overnight buses(overnight saves you the cost of a hotel for the night). There are no buses from Kumamoto directly to Tokyo(since Kumamoto is only Kyushu a seperate part of japan). However from the nearbye Fukuoka you can catch an overnight bus for $150(15000 yen) which only takes 14 and a half hours.

Depending where you are and where you want to go there are also ferry options for transport. From Fukuoka to Tokyo by ferry costs $125(12500 yen) for the cheapest class and takes 34 hours(long journey). However if you like the ocean, have the time and want to travel cheaply the ferry is definitely a good option.

I hope that this has been of some interest and potential use for anyone thinking about travelling around Japan.

The picture today is of a couple of shinkansen at tokyo station.

Japan: Animal Onamatopeia's

Yello Everybody,

I just thought i'd do a brief post today, in my series of small things about Japan. We don't really think about it but in english we have a lot of onamatopeia's(spelling hopefully correct) or words to describe sounds, these include laughter "Ha Ha" is used in writing as the sound of laughter, and "Giggle" for giggling. There are a lot of others, one for almost every sound effect. The most common ones are those concerning animals. Ask any english speaking child what sound a dog makes and they say "Woof Woof", a cat = "Meow Meow" and so on. The interesting thing is that Japan has exactly the same thing, words to describe sound effects, and even though they are describing the exact same sound they are different. Sniffing for example, in english if describing the sound of a dog sniffing around we'd use "Sniff Sniff", in Japanese however it's "Kun Kun". Three common animal sound words in Japan are the Dog( Inu in Japanese) which goes "Wan Wan", the Cat( Neko in Japanese) which goes "Nyan"(or "Nyah") and strangely enough the Rabbit( Usagi in Japanese) which goes "Pyon". If find rabbits going pyon very strange since rabbits are quite animals and in english we don't have a sound word for it.

In terms of anime and otaku related matters the sound words, Wan, Nyan and Pyon are quite relavent since although not overly common, there is a tradition of manga/anime which have characters(generally female) who are either part animal, animal spirits with human form, magical girls who transform into part animals. These characters are generally almost entirely human apart from the ears( mimi in Japanese) and often the tail( shippu in Japanese). The other distinguishing characteristic is their speech paterns, the simplest from of Japanese is A wa B desu( in english approximately "A is B" such as "You are Amazing" "She is Beautiful" and so on), in animal character speech is becomes A wa B wan/nyan/pyon and so on. Animal characters are amongst the most popular to cosplay( costume play the act of dressing up as a character from an anime, not huge but definitely existant all around Japan), probably for the simply fact that a pair of attachable ears and a tail together with whatever costume you like best turns into a cosplay without the effort of going all the way with hair, makeup and accurate costume.

The picture today is Wiki-Tan(the mascot for Wikipedia), doing a nekomimi cosplay.

Last week in Okuchi

Yello Everybody,

This past week was my final week in Okuchi. At the start I ran into a small amount of trouble because the office people had forgotten to book the hotel room, however I called the native support staff and it was all sorted out okay(in hindsight it's a bit funny since the only time this happened was the very last time). I had prepared a special activity along with a goodbye card and goodbye stickers for all the students(as well as a goodbye present of a floral plate for Marika(the Japanese Teacher)). For the younger kids I had an outline of a person and got them to color them as a picture of themselves, For the older kids I had a single square manga/comic with the head and shoulder outline of a person and a large speach bubble, I got them to color and to write hello my name is _____. In both cases the results range from the abract to the semi realistic, but everyone seemed to have fun. The week went by and was overall a lot of fun and without any real difficulties(barring a nosebleed(not caused by anyone it just happened) of one of the younger boys). The saturday events of going to Yatsushiro to teach and the fireworks afterwards, I've already done a post about. On sunday I had a nice day of rest after the long week, and today I did all the tasks like cleaning, class preparation and leaving japan preparations. This coming week is my last week in the Ozu Kikuyo classroom(furthest of the 2 kumamoto schools, 30 minutes by train and a 5 minute walk). Again this is both a happy and a sad thing.

I'll just do a quick otaku section today, as i've previously mentioned in the last few weeks the new season for anime on Japanese television has started and as such we are now seeing alot of different shows being fansubbed. The bigger shows like Clannad, Shakugan no Shana 2 and Genshiken 2 are all being subbed by multiple groups and large groups. However there are a large number of smaller shows(there are a total of 35-36 new shows after all) which smaller dedicated groups are fansubbing. Night Wizards is a farely good show if you like a magic action school drama mix, it's based on a video game and has a good mix of both comedy and action thus far, the story is pretty standard invaders from elsewhere being fought by a secret magic organisation and special gems needed to be collected to save the world. Rental Magic is a decent show in the occult, mystery and school drama genre, it revolves around a company called Astral which rents out magicians for odd jobs(jobs of a magical nature that is), it's set in the present and the magic is a mixture of various countries mythologies. On a completely different style there's Moyashimon, a show about a new university age boy who has the unique gift of being able to see and differentiate microbes(although they don't look like the real thing very much and act a bit like people), it's a pretty wacky comedy thing, with learning about microbes thrown in. Anyway that's just a few of the new shows going around, if you're interested you can always download them, animesuki or bakaupdates which i've mentioned before keeps a track of all the different anime torrents.

The images today are 1 of the Okuchi Green Hotel(where I stayed each time on my trip), 1 of the Okuchi Peppy Kids Club classroom(outside), 1 of a manga collection for an older class and 1 of a figure collection for a younger class.

Yatsushiro Fireworks Festival

Yello Everybody,

Well as with all Okuchi trip weeks, I was unable to do any mid week posts, however this was my very last Okuchi trip(it's an ambivilent feeling, both happy and sad at the same time). Anyway Okuchi is only a 4 day week and this week on saturday I went to teach at Dai2 Yatsushiro school(Yatsushiro is about half way between Kumamoto and Okuchi, maybe a bit closer to Kumamoto). After teaching, I was invited by Tim and Heather(the leaving canadian teachers) to come and see a fireworks festival, Yatsushiro is famous for this festival and it's apparently the biggest one in Kyushu(southern island). We met up with Kanna a friend of theirs and went to the festival, it started around 6 and finished at about 9. There was a massive massive crowd of people and lines absolutely everywhere, everyone in the town and a large number of people from other places come to this festival. The fireworks were amazing, any 15 minutes of the festival was superior to any non state-national government sponsered fireworks in Australia. The fireworks came in an amazing variety of colors, and in incredible gold and silver sparkles, in different shapes(they did hearts, stars, lots of flowers, chicks and other things I couldn't quite work out what they were). The fireworks unlike most of the ones i'm used to weren't one part affairs, a single firework did a lot of different things, a couple of the most impressive were one that exploded into 4 ascending golden balls which remained visable and it finally exploded into a large multicolor firework another one was made up of several fireworks which combined to look like a massive golden tree like thing which suddenly had small blue fireworks explode and move amongst it like fireflies, at another stage they lit a huge line of fireworks held at a decent height of the ground and the trail of each firework combined to look like a waterfall. The best of the night in my opinion was one that flew up as a long silver line high into the sky, exploded into the most massive firework ever with 5 layers of different colors, before turning golden and just when you thought it was over it spun away into little colored spirals. Also around the festival were heaps and heaps of festival food stores, with takoyaki(octopus dumplings), Ikoyaki(fried skewered squid), yakisoba(fried soba noodles), chips, hotdogs, toffle apples, and heaps of other food and drink items as well as toys, and a lot of different glowing and LED flashing items to wave around. Anyway after the fireworks, I went to Tim and Heather's apartments(it was late and they have a spare apartment so I stayed the night). We met up with a couple of the Japanese peppy teachers who had also come(they left at 3:30 for a drive which usually is a bit shorter than an hour(think caloundra to brisbane) and arrived at 7:00, that's how big and popular this festival is) and we went out for dinner at a nice Udon place(udon are thin japanese noodles).

BTW I've mentioned it before by fireworks are called HA NA BI (fire flower) in japanese.

The pictures are just a few I took with my Keitai(mobile phone), one of the huge street of portable festival stores, one of some Takoyaki being made, one of everyone at the Soba restaurant and a couple of fireworks(I didn't take too many fireworks shots(I do have some more though) because the camera on my phone while okay isn't great and because when you take photos of fireworks it's very difficult you have to get you're timing exactly right or miss the color or special effect(also it ruins the experience of watching the actual fireworks).

Japan: Superstitions

Yello Everybody,

Since i'm going away to Okuchi this week, I thought i'd do a post today before leaving. So today in my section on small things about Japan I thought that I would cover a few superstitions that i've heard of.

Sneezing: it's a bit of an old wives tale here in Japan that whenever you sneeze it's because someone is talking about you. This also shows up in anime alot(people talk about one of the other characters and there's a short scene with that character sneezing).

TeruTeruBouzu: children when they are praying for the next day to be sunny they make a little charm out of cloth, it looks a bit like a little ghost with a ball for it's head, eyes and a little cloth like a dress/tail. This charm is then hung up by the window. Apparently if you hang it upside down, it's effect is supposed reversed and you are praying for rain.

Throwing Salt: to ward against or drive of evil spirits a traditional method is to throw salt(supposedly it's holy and they can't stand it). You don't see this very much, if at all but it is a part of the culture.

Shi: Shi is the number 4 and is considered unlucky(a bit like the number 13 in western cultures). This is since the word Shi is similiar in sound to the word for Death(Shin). Which is one of the reasons it's also commonly called Yon instead of Shi. Hospitals and such apparently often avoid numbering patients rooms or wards with a 4.

EDIT: added the teruterubouzu image, as you can see it`s like a little ghost ball thing with a face, it`s also common for kids to make them with special faces(friends, anime characters etc.) for fun.

The Past Week

Yello Everybody,

Sorry about this being my only post for the past week, i've been busy with farewells and work related maters. Last week I was in Kusunoki(closest school) from tuesday to friday and had an office day on saturday. Last night(sunday) I went to the farewell party for Tim and Heather(canadian teaching couple), it was a lot of fun we started with a Nomihodai(all you can drink) and Tabihodai(all you can eat) at Capriciosa(an Italian restaurant that Megami-sensei(one of the JTs) works at part time), the food drink and company was great. There was about 14 people, 10 JTs(japanese teachers) as well as myself, tim, heather and the new teacher Nathan(unfortunately due to other commitments the other native speaker teachers couldn't come). After the dinner most of the JTs left, but 2 and all 4 NTs went to do Kareoke, it was a lot of fun. Japanese Kareoke for those who don't know is very different from the get up on a stage in front of the whole pub type thing we do in Australia, they have Kareoke boxes, private rooms with a Kareoke TV and microphones, where a group of co-workers and/or friends can go and sing, drink and eat the night away. It was good fun.

This week is the start of a new teaching term(terms last 4 weeks approx) and it's my last term, I now have exactly 1 lesson with all my students left. I'm doing up a small farewell card and giving little gifts to all my students as well as trying to do an extra fun-filled last lesson together. This week I'm on my business trip to Okuchi.

A bit of an aside, last week the weather truly changed from moderate to cold and i'm not sure if it's because of that or not. But on tuesday I jogged to the train station, got on the train, it was pretty crowded so I was standing up, when all of a sudden I felt really faint and the world started spinning, before I knew it I was on the floor, a very kind japanese woman(around my age I believe) helped my out and gave me her seat, I'm very happy to say that I wasn't so out of it that I didn't remember to say thankyou to her(in Japanese even). Anyway after that I was entirely fine, I taught the lessons that day and haven't had another problem since, I did have a bit of a fever earlier that day. Anyways, I would just like to give a big shout out to the nameless good samaritan who helped me that day. Domo Arigato Gosaimasu.

The picture today is of the group from the party on sunday. As I mentioned I'm in Okuchi this week, but i'll try to do another post tommorrow and i'll do one on the weekend when I return.

Shifted Week

Yello Everybody,

It's time for my regular weekly Blog. This past week was an office week. It was pretty similiar to the last office week I had, with 3 team teach's with the same 3 teachers at the same 3 school, the only difference was that it was on different days. Tuesday I was in Omuta Kita with Laverne, Wednesday I was in Yamaga with Sally, Thursday I was in the office and Friday I was in Kikuchi with Ian. Saturday I had a day of to make up for the staff meeting on monday. Nothing particularily special happened, although doing multiple team teach's and a staff meeting meant that I had much more contact with native english speakers this past week than I usually do. On an interesting note, on tuesday as I was catching a bus to the school, I managed to have a complete Japanese conversation and properly explain who I am, where I was from, how old I was and what I was doing. I've always been okay with country, name and age, but explaining the type of teaching I did was a bit hard. It's easy to say you're an english teacher but people automatically assume that you mean with a high school and even if you explain that it's with a juku(cram school/after school program), people assume it's like NOVA or one of the other programs and is with high schoolers. However I was happy that I could explain I was teaching at a Juku for younger kids(aged about 4-14) and taught at night time(usually 4-9pm). I've probably been at that level for a while now, but Japanese people brave enough to ask a foreigner about themselves are quite unusual and I hadn't been asked for ages. This is a bit bittersweet, because although i'm happy that i'm at a quasi decent casual speaking level, it's also sad that I've only got to this level and have only a couple of months left(less even). In case you couldn't tell the reason for the post title "Shifted Week" is simply because instead of my usual tuesday to saturday week, I had a monday to friday week for a change. This weekend has been a leasurely time, i've done the generic cleaning and washing stuff, relaxed reading, watch anime, listening to music etc. and gone for some nice walks around the area(not with any particular purpose, just to walk around).

Today in my otaku section I thought I would talk a bit about, the non-Japanese net otaku community(of which I am part, even though I do live in Japan). There is a large community online of people who enjoy Japanese anime/manga to such an extent that they don't want to wait until a series is license translated and sold in there country(it can take a fair while and many series never make it). Luckily there is a smaller group of fans who not only love anime/manga, they are also very good with Japanese, these people translate the manga as it's released in Japan and put it online for others who can't translate it themselves. In the case of anime, this is called Fansub(Fan Subtitle) and it is released by IRC(internet relay chat) and by Bittorrent(a method of group downloading), usually in a basic AVI format(movie format). In the case of manga, this is called scanlation(Scan Translation, as in they get a scan and they translate it) and it is released again by IRC, Bittorrent or since it has a small size, direct download is also common, usually as a collection of PNG or JPG's(picture formats) bundled and zipped or rarred(compression formats). There are a number of ways of finding the releases online, you can search for the group who is fansubbing/scanlating individually or there are many sites which compile the releases from all groups(or most groups). I personally like Baka-Updates(baka means idiot in japanese) for recent anime releases(they also have a secondary site called Manga-Updates for manga releases), the biggest one is probably AnimeSuki(suki means like/love in japanese) which not only has an extensive list but also a large forum community. The picture this week is an advertisement for Shakugan no Shana II(which I mentioned briefly previously), the first episode of which has already been fansubbed by a few good groups and was quite good(the story needs to be expanded upon but the animation and voice acting quality was high).

Japan: Sports

Yello Everybody,

I was racking my brain for some small facet of the Japanese culture to do a post on, and I realised that I hadn't discussed sports yet. Sports of all kinds are popular in Japan(just like any other modern country). However the most popular sports are Soccer and Baseball.

Soccer has been huge in Japan for a fair while but it really got big after the world cup was held in Yokohama, Japan in 2002. There are lots of leagues, at local, regional and national levels(the national league is known as J-League and watching and supporting a team is a very common thing). As any soccer fan would know Australia narrowly knocked Japan out of contention in the last world cup.

Baseball has been in Japan even longer than soccer and was introduced(by the American's of course) over 100 years ago). Baseball is probably even bigger than soccer although it really depends on the area, some area's a big on Soccer and some are big on Baseball(and the big cities generally are big on both). Again there are many leagues for baseball at all levels.

It's a bit of a strange thing that Japan an asian country, has as it's favorite 2 sports: Baseball(an almost exclusively American passtime) and Soccer(an european/british love).

Of course many other sports are also big and see leagues, and TV etc. The 3rd biggest would probably be Martial Arts(which comes in all flavors, both imported like Karate and local like Judo, Kendo(martial arts with a sword, in this case a wooden sword) and of course Sumo). Sumo in the area's which see tournaments is a very big thing, it's without a doubt the traditional Japanese spectator sport. I haven't actually been to a Judo fight(partly because i'm not a fight fan by nature and mainly because of the cost and the distances involved), however after speaking to those who have, it seems that there is a lot more of a ceremonial aspect than in most other fighting sports. Everyone who has seen it reccommends it.

The picture today is of the traditional Japanese sport of Sumo.

More than just an Otaku Teacher

Yello Everybody,

After reading through much of my Blog i've come to the conclusion that I come of as a massive otaku with no other interests. The massive otaku part is correct but I do have more to me than just that, so as a change of pace I thought i'd give a brief list of non-otaku things about me.

- I'm fairly musical, I learnt up to first grade piano as a child and moved on and did up to 3rd grade saxophone in high school, I played saxophone in my parents church band for a while, I busked for money one christmas, I still have the saxophone and want to start playing on and off again once I return to Australia.

- I've tried several different sports, team soccer for many years as a child, tennis for a year, and in high school I did team basketball for a year.

- I'm good at 10 pin bowling, I was a league bowler for a couple of years in high school and I still love bowling. My best average was 175 but generally I was somewhere between 125-150 average, my highest score was 224(I really wanted 225 though), I still own a couple of bowling balls, some bowling shoes and bowling gloves.

- I like most genres of music, In Australia I listen to Triple J on the radio(government sponsered youth channel which supports local Australian music and new artists), I particularily like the Hilltop Hoods(Australia Rap Group). I also like the parody stylings of Weird Al Yankovich and have many of his CDs.

- I like comedy shows on TV, the australian ethnic comedy known as "Pizza"(it's had several series and ran on SBS(internation/ethnic free to air channel)) is a favorite, i've seen most of the series and I even went to their live show(the series is very rude and treats nothing as sacred but it's a heap of fun), I also love the BBC sci-fi parody comedy series known as "Red Dwarf"(8 series with a movie supposedly in the works).

- I love bike riding, I particularily enjoy distance riding, the best two i've done is an 80 km trip to Brisbane from my home in Caloundra and a 120 km(I think) from Caloundra to Noosa and back over half of the way to Maroochydore(before meeting the father of a friend who had a car, and giving up from exhaustion).

- I enjoy the theatre(my father was a theatre manager for most of my life), I liked the show Cats, and particularily enjoyed the Gilbert and Sullivan opera's such as "The Pirates of Penzance".

- I feel i'm a fairly good driver however I have written of 2 cars, 1 in a car to car collision due to unpreventable circumstances(no one was hurt, excepting a little whiplash in my case) and 1 in a solo accident on a dirt road, where the car actually flipped(again I was uninjured, although in that case it was probably a miracle). I still enjoy driving and i'm much more careful now.

- I'm not super widely travelled however, I have been to Bali in Indonesia(family vacation) and I went on a trip to both Turkey and Greece(arranged through the school and with students and a teacher participating, but not arranged by the school). Of the 3 I recommend Turkey, the people were fantastic, the food was good, the costs were cheap and there's a heap of things to see(I do however recommend Japan over Turkey). I would like to visit many many more countries, however at the top of my list are Egypt(the nile, pyramids) and England(my father is first generation australia, his parents and siblings were all born in England, so it's ancestral but also because of all the famous sites around London, i'd also love to do a Monopoly Board pub crawl, 1 drink at each square of a monopoly board(original british version of course), a very good friend of mine called Beck, is living over there as a teacher at the moment.)

Well I hope that this was interesting to some and has given people a bit more of a understanding of me, beyond the Otaku obsession. The pictures today are of a Saxophone, a Bike and 10-Pin Bowling(none of which are mine, but regardless).

The weekly roundup

Yello Everybody,

Once again it's time for my week blog entry. This past week I was in Ozu Kikuyo classroom(furthur of the 2 kumamoto schools, 30 minutes by train, 5-10 minutes walk). The week went well with nothing particularily amazing happening and no incidents of note. I did run into a motorbike riding parcel delivery man named Hiroto who was about my age and could speak quite good english, we had a nice chat. I applied for tertiary entrance online midweek. Sunday was my day off and I just ended up relaxing and doing general cleaning stuff. Today we had a staff meeting(a small one since 3 teachers were away on trips) and I met the new teacher a guy named Nathan who is from Brisbane QLD Australia of all places(only an hour from where I come from), he seems like a nice guy and is still just settling into the area. We also found out that our over company has had a name change, we are still Peppy Kids Club but KTC has changed to iTTTi(internation Teaching Training and Travel institute I think). This coming week is an office week, I have 1 day in the office on thursday, 3 Team Teaches and Saturday is a day off(makes up for the monday work day today).



Today in my Otaku section I want to mention a very interesting anime/manga that I came across recently(and which is unfortunately not seeing enough support online). The series is called Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei(literally meaning Goodbye Mr Despair), it's a high school comedy centering around the antics of Nozomu Ishoshiki a teacher who sees all aspects of life in the worst possible light(He acts suicidal but his attempts never seem that serious) and his class of misfits(mainly female) including Kafka Fura(pen name relating to frank kafka) who is his exact opposite seeing the positive in things even when it doesn't exist(she believed that him trying to hang himself was an attempt to grow taller), Meru Otonashi(mail + soundless are the meanings of her name) a extremely quite girl who is at the same time incredibly rude via SMS messaging, Chiri Kitsu(her name gives the meaning correctly) she is extremely obsessive compulsive and demands that everything is exact(level socks, equal splitting of cakes, her hair is parted 50/50 dead center), Kiri Komori(her name implys "It sticks in it's home") she is an extreme Hikkikomori(recluse who won't leave there room for any reason) who even after leaving her house becomes an in school Hikkikomori, and many others including a refugee, a returnee(japanese person who lived abroad and came back) with multiple cultural personas, a girl who appears to suffer from Domestic Violence but is in fact attacked by animals due to a animal tail fetish, a stalker and so on. Nozomu's family is equally twisted possibly due to the fact that when written and read western style(across) as opposed to japanese style(down) their names all end up with a different and negative meaning like Nozomu's Mr Despair, his sister becomes Unequaled(with a erotic implication similiar to Horny), his brother a Medical doctor becomes Dr Death and so on. The entire series is a fairly in depth look into a lot of facets of Japanese culture all cast in an incredibly negative and comedic light. The anime is done by Shaft a company known for its wacky animation style they also did Pani Poni Dash and the 2nd Negima?! series. The incredibly funky opening song/movie is the image content for today, is got a great rock feel.