Yeah quite a few people got squished when I went. You got health insurance?
Cool, let me know if you want to come and I’ll put you on the adv list. Also, since it’s in Higashi Nakano, it’s close to Nakano Broadway which is a recommended spot to check out.
I’m staying on Naoshima at a b&b that has loads of cats there.
Yeah, they seem to make it super easy if you’re over there… from vending machines in newsagents(!?) but to find out what date they went on sale, to how to get them had me scratching my head.
It’s the same with a few gigs I’ve seen that are on… the residents are playing but God knows how to get tickets and it looks like they’re playing a restaurant? 
And I gave up with a few attempts at getting some J pop tickets… so confusing 
Haha there’s something in the small print how they’ll make sure you get to hospital but after that you’re on your own 
It does seem to be a weird thing of “oh, you’re not already in Japan. Hmm, that’s difficult”
When we went to see the Polysics, you bought tickets from Lawson’s shops, which are like a 7eleven.
Lots of convenience stores have a little machine like an ATM where you buy your (numbered) tickets.
For a country so obsessed with technology, Japan has an odd few blind spots when it comes to going paperless or allowing things to be done via the web/smartphone, and buying tickets is definitely one of them.
Are the machines easy to navigate?
We ended up buying a lot of our tickets (Ghibli museum, train tickets etc) in person from the little Japan tourist office in Liberty’s department store.
You can do it over the phone via there as well, if you can’t make it to London.
Yeah unfortunately I’m crisscrossing Austria going to rural locations 6 weeks before the trip and was broke over Xmas. Got to go to the one travel agency that sells Japanese Rail Passes in Austria when I’m in Vienna next week because I can’t reliably get things posted to me.
Can’t you get the pass posted to the hotel you’re staying at in Japan?
No because I fly via Osaka, stay there overnight in a cheap place I wouldn’t really trust to receive it, then go to Tokyo the next morning.
It gets a bit complicated, because some of them need a Japanese mobile phone number, but they are straightforward IF (and this is where it gets even more complicated) you have the code (like an old videoplus+ number) from one of the listings magazines.
Shop staff are very helpful though, if you take a few screenshot of what you are after (not many people, especially men, speak good enough English to understand fully what you’ll be after)
This sums it up better than I can:
Thank you
so jelly of you all going to japan. think i might start trying to learn a bit of the language, just for something to do.
Does watching the start/end of Frasier count? 
???
(body seems unclear, fuck off sean)
At the start/end of each episode of Frasier the sponsor (think it’s a yogurt) teaches you the Japanese for hello, goodbye etc
hahah oh yeah. japanese isn’t on duolingo but there’s a thing called human japanese i downloaded a trial for. will see how it goes.
I’d stay on miyajima overnight rather than 2 nights in Hiroshima
If I can get my cousins to babysit then I could maybe come along to it