Today in culture class we talked a bit about the schools in Japan. Like in America, there's the concept of elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and college. In middle school, students are very communal, and they work in groups of about four to learn the material, and the teacher kind of supervises. They are responsible for a lot of things, including serving lunch, which can take a little while for them to learn.

Today we had an interesting culture class in which we started to discuss how Japanese families operate. Some of the operating guidelines include Soto vs. Uchi and Tatame vs. Honne. Soto and Uchi are inside and outside, relating to the house. This separation between the inside and outside worlds is pretty evident in everyday life. For example, to enter a Japanese house, you remove your outside shoes and put on house slippers. Then, to enter bedrooms or eating areas with tatami floors, you remove your slippers too. Tatame vs.

In class today, we learned about Japanese mimetics. In addition to the many onomatopoeia they have called giongo, they also have words for things that don't originally have noise, and these are the gitaigo. They have sound words to describe silent things like staring ("jirojiro"), words to describe how things feel like fluffiness ("fuwafuwa"), and even sound words to describe the viscoscity of things like "bitabita" for really thick or sticky things.

So despite being in Japan, the big news today is that the game I worked on for Vicarious Visions, Guitar Hero: On Tour, released on Sunday. It's only out in America I believe, so I can't get my hands on a retail copy yet, but IGN's review is pretty positive, they give it a 9/10.

I've heard unofficially that the game sold 70,000k copies on it's first day, (I have no idea how good Sunday releases for games usually do, but sounds pretty good), and that 2 million copies of the game were manufactured.

Spent another day in Kyoto today, went to see Kinkakuji, which is a palace covered in gold.