K-ON! Movie makes over ¥600million in just 9 days

Figures released earlier this week show that the K-ON! Movie, the first full length film of the Light Music Club, made ¥691million yen and sold over 523,000 seats at the cinemas.
If there was any doubt about the popularity of K-ON! I believe these figures will prove it is still as big a fan favourite as when we first saw Yui, Mio, Ritsu, Mugi and Azu-nyan on our small screens, enjoying cake and tea more than their music.

Film4's Christmas Studio Ghibli Season

This may be old news to some of you, especially as it is now four days in, but Film4 (a digital television channel in the United Kingdom) announced recently that they will be screening a Studio Ghibli film everyday from the 10th to 25th December.

The films on offer are a mixture of popular and well known Ghibli titles, like My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, and the lesser known titles of their extensive and impressive back catalogue, like Castle of Cagliostro or The Little Norse Prince. Film4 have also made the decision to run all the films with their original Japanese voice talent with English subtitles. This Christmas season definitely has a treat every day in the run up to the big day!

The full list of titles is as follows (all times are GMT):

Ponyo - 10th December 6.55pm
Princess Mononoke - 11th December 4.40pm
Tales from Earthsea - 12th December 4.25pm
Lupin the Third: Castle of Cagliostro - 13th December 4.45pm
The Little Norse Prince - 14th December 5.10pm
Only Yesterday - 15th December 4.10pm
Whisper of the Heart - 16th December 5.05pm
The Cat Returns - 17th December 4.50pm
Kiki's Delivery Service - 18th December 4.25pm
Castle in the Sky - 19th December 4.25pm
Pom Poko - 20th December 4.15pm
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds - 21st December 4pm
Porco Rosso - 22nd December 4.55pm
Ocean Waves - 23rd December 5.30pm
My Neighbour Totoro - 24th December 5.15pm
Ponyo (Repeated) - 25th December 5.10pm

I personally am surprised that the other two Studio Ghibli films that received a cinema release in the UK (Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle) are not part of this schedule, but this looks like a brilliant season none-the-less.

Studio Ghibli Season on Film4

New Title, New Goals, New Ideas, Fresh Start

Hello All,

For those of you that read my blog regularly will have noticed, it has all now changed. I decided this last night after a lot of consideration of what to do with my blog to make it more appealing to other people, and more interesting to myself to make me want to post even more regularly. The decision I made was to focus on my favourite past-time of all, Japan!

In this rebooted blog I will be talking about anime, manga, computer games, music, otaku culture and all things Japan inbetween. All of the above, I realised recently, are things I interact with everyday which is where my decision for change came from, as I do study everyday but sometimes not enough to make a decent blog post from (who wants to hear about revision?!?!?!).

I already have plans for quite a few posts, and will be sharing them in the next few days. In the meantime, the site design is still a work-in-progress and will hopefully be complete by christmas.

Thanks for joining me,

That Brit Otaku (previously paulp1988)

JLPT N5 done

Hello All,

Just thought I would update my blog whilst waiting for my train (just missed one by about 30seconds and now have to wait 30mins for the next one due to Sunday service...). As the title of this blog suggests, I have just come out from my JLPT N5 examination and I feel slightly positive about it.

For those that don't know, the JLPT is an examination on your understanding of the Japanese language. There are 3 sections to this test, vocabulary, grammar, and listening.
The first section I found really easy, as it was effectively just a test of your kanji knowledge, which I have gotten really good at.
The second section tested your knowledge of Japanese sentence structure and particles. This onee I found a bit more difficult than the first section and by the end I was almost guessing the ones I weren't sure on (it's a multiple choice examination with generally 4 choices per question, had a good chance of getting it right lol).
The last section was a whole lot harder than I had anticipated. The language used seemed higher than JLPT N5 to me, but I may be wrong. There were a few easy questions there, and then I just tried my hardest to have an educated guess at the rest lol.

Unfortunately I won't find out until March 2012 if I passed, and I'm hoping the questions I was confident on are enough to get me through. Either way I'm going to take a few well deserved days off from studying and then prepare for JLPT N4 next year.

JLPT5 booked!!

おひさしぶりですね！

I can't believe I haven't posted in so long, I really should get better at that.

If any of you don't know what the phrase at the top means it is "it's been a while" (ohisashiburi desu ne). And obviously it has been too long!

I have now booked my JLPT5 examination. This will take place in December in the London SOAS university. I am already really nervous, and am slightly expecting to fail, but I am going to try my hardest and I will be happy no matter what.

The reason I am expecting to fail is that, although I know the majority of the JLPT5 vocabulary and kanji, I have never really tested my Japanese with anyone else as there is only one other person I know who is studying Japanese but she is at a LOT higher level than me, so I cannot understand the majority of it yet.

Another reason I feel like I may fail are that recently I seem to be forgetting some of the easier words, so am having to revise twice as hard as I used to. Maybe the adrenaline will kick in when I get in the exam and I will remember everything, but its really not helping my nerves at the moment.

As negative as I sound, I am sure I will do well, and I am normally a positive person so hopefully I will get that back before the exam.

My study routine has been taken up a notch aswell. Previously I would study the vocabulary and kanji maybe once a day, but now I am trying to do both of these multiple times a day so that I cram everything in by the exam. Actually, as I type this blog post, I am listening to a japanesepod101 lesson (it may be about culture, but there a few words in the lesson that I thought I had forgotten but I recognised them and knew what they meant!)

I will be posting a large, photo based, blog post hopefully later today or in the next few days of some of the studying I have been doing.

Thanks for reading!