I am furiously refreshing my language skills ahead of my trip there in July. I barely knew a word on my last trip in 2001, but I had a friend to rely on most of the time. This visit I’m on my own for most of it and I’m looking forward to inflicting my terrible Japanese on people.

@Kairu Ishimaru: there’s more where these came from. In all seriousness though, my Japanese is worse than the average Japanese person’s attempt at English!

@Hige: DVDs are the same region (R2), albeit in NTSC rather than PAL; if you have an HD set I suspect that makes no difference. Irritatingly the Blu-ray discs on the other hand are incompatible with UK players – another occasion where we get the raw deal in comparison with the US!

EDIT: Ah, @lastarial, you beat me to it! Yeah, it’s a minor nuisance but hopefully most discs will be region-free in the future. It’s often the lack of English subtitle tracks that put me off splurging even more money on DVDs.

Always interesting reading your thoughts Martin. It should be mentioned that Engrish is not confined to Japan… I’ve just returned from a couple of weeks travelling around Europe and there is a similar love affair with mangled English on the continent. Although thankfully it does tend to be in smaller doses. Nothing quite as superb as your Machida restaurant.

Also, I thought Japan has the same DVD/Blu-Ray region as us? Region 2?

Watch or listen to it, enjoy it, then sell it back to the shop and pick up something else: it’s an interesting theory that explains quite a lot of what I saw on my numerous shopping trips.

This is a very interesting model, which I imagine is self-sustaining for the media because of the forced churn by the first owners.

Also nice to find out that Akiba remembers love. Post pics of your scale model please.