another reason the internet teaches you everything you need to know

Remember that Kotaku scavenger hunt that I briefly mentioned in the last post? That surprisingly kind of came in handy today.

We have a class called "nihon jijou" (literally "Japanese conditions" or "Japanese reasons"). Jijou is the class where we learn general information about Japan and Japanese culture, from really basic things such as how to sort the trash and use the bathroom properly (no, really, that was a whole class's worth of information) to food and weather patterns. Today we covered the many forms of Japanese theater and the ideas behind them. In the handout was this picture:

My first thought was, holy crap, I've seen that lady in the bottom left corner before! I know I have... but where?

And then I remembered...

image from kotaku.com

While I was digging around on my scavenger hunt, I stumbled across a post reporting that a musical production of one of my favorite games, Phoenix Wright, was in the works. And that it was being performed by an all female cast. Usually, this kind of stuff wouldn't excite me, especially because the use of "cross-dressing" in this post misled me into thinking this was just another outlieing instance of weirdness in Japan, but now that I know what that the female-only theater is an actual type of theater, I'm kind of interested. This female acting troupe is famous, too. I might be looking for tickets to the February peformance :3

On a side note, this confirms that I'm finally becoming able to differentiate between and recognize Asian people XD. I know it sounds terrible, but it was really hard to do when I first got here and was meeting tons of new people. I guess we look the same to them too, because two of the American guys have beards and sometimes wear glasses and the Japanese students constantly confuse them.