西洋오랑캐

Fist of the North Star was/is a fairly famous comic book / cartoon / franchise in Japan, and apparently it was popular enough in other areas to warrant a South Korean live action version. Much like the live action Korean Street Fighter, the production values of this show are well…lacking, but if you like your Korean men with facial hair and kicking with trailing effect, then definately check this video out!

Billy Murry, The Chick From Ghost World, The Dude Who Played Pheobe’s Half-Brother On Friends, and Random Japanese Tits…What’s Not To Like?

I finally got around to checking out Lost In Translation today (God do I feel like Jackie Harvey, The Onion’s Hollywood outsider). Man what an outstanding film that was! It had everything one could want in a film: outstanding humor, beautiful cinematography, and Japanese tits…it doesn’t get any better than that!

As a foreigner residing in Asia there were a lot of scenes that spoke to me. The scene where Bob (Bill Murray) is recieving directions from a film director via a translator reminded me a lot of when I first came to Korea. The director would speak for like five minutes and the translator was like, “He said look at the camera.” It was a lot like staff meetings at my first place of employment. The owner would speak for like five minutes and then our supervisor would be like, “He said, ‘Good job.’”

The other thing that really stuck with me was the a brief segment in which the main characters were out on the town and Bill Murray’s character ends up chatting it up with some random Japanese dude at a bar. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country for any period of time will know that experience and know that kind of local who will strike up drunken conversation with foreigners at bars.

There were some things that did not apply to me. Mainly the fact that I have enough of a command of Korean to carry on most conversations (and definately to order dinner without resorting to pointing to a menu). Additionally I did not feel any of the loneliness or desparation the characters in this movie felt due to being in a foreign land, but perhaps this comes from the fact that I can communicate with locals. I’ve met foreingers who can’t speak Korean and end up being miserable here.

One other thing I noticed was the shots of Tokyo really made Seoul seem like a tiny, slum like city. Even if all they stuff shown in this movie was shot in the nicest parts of Tokyo, I’ve been to the nicest, most extravagent parts of Seoul and the stuff I saw in this flick beat Seoul down like Hulk Hogan beating down Andre The Giant.

※ Editor’s Note: The Korean title of this flick is 사랑도 통역이 되나요? which works out to be something along the lines of “Can ‘Love’ Be Translated As Well?” This is kind of ironic in that this title kind of lost something in the translation.

Note to self: Don’t piss of the nation of Korea or someone in the country will write a crappy song about how evil I am and name said song, “Fuckin’ Wyatt.”

Hot on the heels of the chart topping “Fuckin’ USA,” comes “Fuck Zapan.”* Brought to us by K-rap superstars, DJ Doc, this tune eloquently explains the angry Korea has towards Japan…oh wait no it doesn’t. It makes fun of how Japanese people speak, and proclaims that Japan is Korea’s toilet.

To make this song even better they use my (sarcasm)favorite(/sarcasm) Korean Romanization style of writing a J sound with a Z…awesome! Well, with this song in addition to the epic, “독도는 우리 땅” it’s pretty safe to say who’s winning this conflict…

* note: The only copy of this tune I could find online was a wmv file that features WWF superstars getting beat down with the faces of Japanese politicos superimposed on them. The file is over 8meg…just so you know.

Apparently Yon-sama and Winter Sonata aren’t enough to satisfy the Korean needs of those in Japan…apparently they now need to obsess about my girlfriend. Yesterday while shopping, a pair of women stopped her and asked her some questions about her gear and took her picture. It turns out they were reporters for a Japanese website / magazine about Korean fashion.

Here’s the afore mentioned wacky Japanese website in which my girlfriend is interviewed. Neither of us can read Japanese so we’ve no idea what is being said (she said they asked her more than two questions so she had no idea what ones were being used).

Behold! The Yong-sama teddy bear…for those of you not in my room, I’m currently shaking my head in disgust. Anyhow here’s the link:
http://www.brokore.com/joonbear/index.asp

The cheap ass socks and trips to Seoul aren’t enough anymore.