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Nintendo + Apple

16 Jan 2012
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gaming japan rant tech

The connection - or rather, similarity - between Nintendo and Apple is incredible.

Here are a few choice quotes from Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic, one of the better Nintendo books from the last few years:

"I think they have a lot in common with us in that we both make unique, interesting products that surprise people. I really respect and think highly of Nintendo. I myself own a Gamecube and a Wii." -Phil Schiller, 2008

Apple takes pride in its software development, bringing new experiences to its customers on the twin pillars of hardware and software. On that count, it's certainly not unlike Nintendo. [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata himself agrees: "We want people to be surprised, and we want people to call our approach unique. That's what people say about Apple, too.

It's cherry-picking the numbers, but if you stack up quarterly sales numbers from 2005 through 2008 the lines are identical. Apple's are higher by a steady margin of about $3 billion, but the lines are identical in shape:

That's Apple on top, in black, and Nintendo below in grey, and me creepily peering around from behind the book

The quotes are endless about how either company wants to surprise people, or focuses on R&D heavily, or holds employees accountable, or how execs use each other's products, or has been to the brink of death and back, or has millions of people waiting with baited breath before product announcements.

My personal favorite common factor about the two companies is how both reach into their back catalogues of experiences and bring them back in unexpected ways. Roughly 48% of all media coverage of the iPad has referenced the Newton (a prototype PDA from 1993, pretty far ahead of its time). Other recurring themes include the Macintosh and iMac unveils, but you'd have to find a dedicated Apple fan to get you more examples than that.

I can give you some Nintendo ones, though. The 3DS is, in a sense, a refinement of the Virtual Boy that came about once the technology improved. Nintendo has some product failures, such as Virtual Boy, just like Apple had the entire 1990s and the Motorola ROKR. Products aside, Nintendo brings back some small details in very subtle ways. Check out this little tune, which was bundled with a DSiWare animation app called Flipnote Studio:

Seems innocent enough, until you find that someone snuck a very similar tune into a secret level of Super Mario 3D Land:

And it turns out that these little tricksters have a long history of doing this stuff. If you owned a GameCube, you may not have ever known that the calming ambient system menu music is actually borrowed from a Famicom (NES) accessory that never made it to the US:

Speaking of hardware that never left Japan, learning about Satellaview blew my mind. It was a SNES addon with a satellite modem that let players download small segments of Nintendo games and even play along with live broadcast audio tracks, creating a sort of Legend of Zelda-meets-radio drama kind of feel.

But the "download small segments of Nintendo games" is the big thing here. New bits of content for games like Link to the Past, F-Zero and Dr. Mario were created exclusively for the service. So, in effect, Nintendo was pushing the boundaries of what we now know as downloadable content and episodic gaming. In 1995. Here's a commercial, and even though it's in Japanese, you can get a basic idea of what's going on:

So in one corner you have Apple, which tried to take the computer mobile nearly 20 years ago with Newton and failed because the technology wasn't ready. And in the other you have Nintendo, which tried to reinvent gaming by way of connectivity over 15 years ago and failed because the technology wasn't ready (at least on the small scale of Japan, which didn't have terrestrial Internet in 1995). The ideas were always there, but the means weren't.

After being an Apple user for some five years, and having read Steve's bio, I'm finally coming around to understanding why someone would be an Apple fan, someone who follows the company out of something more than attachment to the products themselves, someone who sticks by in thick and thin.

I'm understanding it because I'm the same way with Nintendo, a very similar company.

Postscript

In all fairness, Nintendo didn't invent the gaming modem. The Sega Channel beat Nintendo to the punch in 1994, but the precedent for failed gaming modems goes back way further than I ever thought.

In fact, attempts at connected gaming go all the way back to the Atari 2600. If Wikipedia is to be believed, that failed attempt became the eventual core technology of AOL.

If Nintendo had to be 'first' at something in the field, it was the use of a broadcast satellite, although even the Golden Age-era consoles used cable TV to achieve much the same effect.

(On an aside from my aside, Ed Rotberg, the creator of Battlezone, even told me that gameplay analytics were thought of at Golden Age-era Atari but the machines needed modems to phone home. Does the gaming industry have any ideas that weren't originally thought up in the 1970s?)

And while I'm doing the errors-and-corrections segment, I may as well admit that the 48% statistic about Newton is totally made up.

False Nostalgia

16 Jan 2012
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japan

There's a clip just like this one that was always used as B-roll footage when Japan was in the news every day at the end of the 80s. Sunset palette, city traffic, and those really boxy vans are really all I remember of it. It symbolized Japan's rise in the world, although I was still too young to make the connection between my beloved Nintendo and the nation of Japan - the economic juggernaut, the world power, the orderly society and the O.G. peaceful rise.

Still, there's something that that image triggers for me. For a native Japanese, it'd probably trigger nostalgia, if anything, for that brief moment when Japan sat at the top of the world. For me, well, it's almost nostalgic but never could be. How could I look back fondly on a time and place where I never lived?

That sense is probably why I loved Shenmue, an old Dreamcast game with a cult following that was known for its ahead-of-its-time open world more than the story, fighting or controls. Even though it hasn't aged well at all, at the time it felt like an incredibly realistic, explorable re-creation of a 1980s Tokyo suburb. Shenmue allowed me to visit this imagined place from the B-roll and see what it would have been like.

That sensation is also why I count Crazy Ken Band among my guilty pleasures. The song below, like most of Crazy Ken's, is itself an exercise in nostalgia: for summers past, for old Detroit muscle cars, for an older rock-n-roll sound, for youth, and always for an alternate-reality sort of Americana pinpointed to the sailor-filled port city of Yokosuka, where American influence has been heavy since the war. It may not be for the bubble heyday, but Crazy Ken acts the same in remembering an older Japan, mixing details real and imagined for a very specific feel.

The feeling is even why I love Sushiyama, a Dallas sushi restaurant that doesn't try to chase the chic, modern, date-friendly decor that so many American sushi joints go for. While the place is actually a tacky pseudo-Japanese mockup of a cozy izakaya, when I'm there I willingly buy into it and feel a little bit temporarily transported.

Between all the images of the country I've consumed over my lifetime, I think I've sort of created a false memory for myself that looks back fondly on a Japan gone by.

The Japanese have a word for nostalgia: natsukashii. But to put it as simply 'nostalgia' in English is a poor translation. In Japanese the word has a more specific, nuanced meaning that leans toward the emotions stirred up by recalling times past - which can be collectively shared, thanks to Japanese uniformity in experience.

Let me put it this way: if you say "that's so nostalgic" in English, someone could ask you for more detail. "Nostalgic for what?" you may be asked. But say it in Japanese - natsukashii desu ne - and the response will be more like "I know what you mean."

Oddly enough, this dude took a camcorder (VHS!) to Tokyo at the end of the 80s. For people who know the city, it's easy to recognize East Shinjuku in the video. It's amazing how little the area has changed in 20 or 30 years. So if Tokyo in 1987 was very nearly the same as it was in 2007, maybe my memories of the area at Japan's peak, false though they are, aren't so inaccurate.

To Tokyo I go (in a while)

7 Nov 2011
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career japan life

The cat's out of the bag. I'm moving to Tokyo!

I told Facebook (ie, my friends and loved ones) about a week or so ago, but I've more or less known I'd go for a while longer than that. It was really just a matter of reaching a particular level of certainty that crazy random twists wouldn't happen at the last minute.

I guess they still could happen, but at this point I'm OK with stopping the job search and turning down whatever leftover job search calls that trickle in. (Why do I care about this? About 48 hours before my first departure to Japan, back in '07, Google called completely out of the blue. Making that decision was agonizing and sleep-depriving.)

Where ya going?

So, for the handful of readers who haven't already been exposed to the news somehow, I'm headed to Rakuten, Japan's #1 in e-commerce. (That's pronounced 'rock-ten.') I'll start in April 2012, so I'll be moving at the end of March.

What're ya doing?

Honestly? I don't know. They'll assign me after a month of training. Could be their core e-commerce business, or it could be new lines of business (like Travel, Golf or Weddings!), or it could be international rollouts of existing products (how about Edy for your NFC money needs?), or it could be assisting in international acquisitions (which have happened so far in the US, UK, France, Russia and China by joint venture). They're a big company but still have room to grow at 7,000 employees (for comparison, Amazon has 43,000).

Are you nervous?

You mean about radiation? Not so much. I'm more nervous about leaving loved ones very far behind here in the US.

Are you excited?

Hell yes! A UT alum already working for the company was cool enough to reach out to me and tell me all about his experience. Seems like he's having a great time. When I was living and teaching in the boonies, I came to Tokyo to recharge my batteries. Now I'll live there.

Isn't it expensive? Are you making enough money to live on?

Tokyo housing isn't as bad as you may have been led to believe. I've found apartments online for about $1,000 a month in rent in awesome locations. Small, sure, but definitely not shoebox-sized. It'll be less if I let Rakuten set me up with housing. The company is located on the southern edge of central Tokyo, in Shinagawa. That's a major bullet train stop and is just around the corner from Haneda Airport, the swanky city one that just started taking international flights. I'll live somewhere roughly 30 minutes from Shinagawa. If I'm lucky it'll be in another big neighborhood such as Naka-meguro. Otherwise I'll just be a teeny-tiny bit closer to Yokohama: convenient to work but a little further from all the fun action.

For other money matters, Rakuten has free breakfast and lunch and pays for my commuting. I just need to pay for suits to wear!

What are you doing in the meantime?

I'm headed home to Texas to enjoy the winter at home, rent-free, with Mom. I'm going to miss California a lot but it'll be a good place for 4 months' downtime before things get crazy. Oh, also, I'm looking for an honest 4 months' work in Texas! So, uh, bring me in as a temp or something!

I'll be home before Thanksgiving!

Tokyo in Pictures

27 Dec 2010
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japan pics travel time

So, the main winter break vacation post will be from Seoul, but my partner in crime Adam and I swung through Tokyo on the way back home. We had the unique pleasure of spending a full two days with my former IR/PS classmate Kentaro, and reuniting with a collection of UT/JA peeps in Roppongi as well.

In this collection:
-Amazingly delicious sushi food porn
-Fall colors still visible in Ueno Park
-People!
-The shrines and Buddhas of Kamakura
-One Yokohama shot from an automotive tour

By the by, all shots were taken with an iPhone 4. For a phone camera, I’m pretty impressed.

(download)

JET Program, meet chopping block

25 Jul 2010
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japan

The JET Program sent me to Japan. There are many ways to go to Japan these days to do entry-level work like teaching English, but this is the preferred way to go since it's the only one with Japanese government backing.

Japan got a new prime minister earlier this summer, and the buzzword of the day is "fiscal responsibility," which led to the extension of a government-wide review of a huge range of government programs. Naturally, JET came under review. There's a really good writeup of events on jetwit.com by a JET alum and Columbia SIPA graduate. I've taken a few bits and added some commentary and things that you should consider if you're a JET-watcher, alum, or prospective participant:

Snippet: During the course of the proceedings, the JET Program was criticized as being ineffective in raising the level of Japan’s English education. One of the more publicized comments called for the elimination of the Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) portion of JET.

Translation: This assessment is pretty much correct - as far as educational programs go, it's about as close to worthless as you can get. If you took fancy new American educational metrics to JET-subscribing schools, I'd bet good money you'd see virtually no correlation with English skills among the students or graduates. The common observation among alums is that each class has one super-star child, who would have been awesome at English with or without an awkward white person standing at the front of the room every day. This is why the overwhelming majority of school districts have dropped JET in favor of less costly private dispatch providers such as Interac. Seen in this light, JET looks like a pretty poor investment for the Japanese government (who go to enormous cost to hire teachers through embassies, fly them to Japan, and pay them way above local cost of living).

Snippet: In its June meeting in Washington, D.C., the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Exchange (CULCON), a joint US-Japan “wisemen’s commission” scathingly criticized the shortsightedness of any move to cut the JET Program, issuing a statement that [strongly endorsed the JET Program].

Translation: A handful of policy wonks who do work of questionable value, are likely all JET alums, and have their employment thanks to that status desperately want to see the program live.

Snippet: For its part, the US State Department also seems to be taking the position that the JET Program makes valuable contributions to the long-term underpinnings of US-Japan relations and cutting it will be harmful.

Translation: State Department employees focused on Japan likely include a significant population of alums from JET or similar programs in other countries. If they can't work on fun cultural exchange stuff like JET any more, they'll be sent back to the passport division, and that would suck.

Snippet: The general sense was that the JET Program was being evaluated as an educational program with the exchange component being given short shrift, since its impact is difficult to quantify and assess.

Translation: Hai, there's the rub. JET stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching. In truth, the State Department is right to observe that the demise of JET would adversely affect US-Japan relations in the long run. But I believe that the effects of JET can be observed, and it wouldn't be very hard at all. Ignore the financial sector for a minute and look at the Westerners working in bilateral roles between Japan and Western countries. I'd wager that the JET alums in general (a) are in roles of greater import and (b) leave their Japanese bosses more satisfied than non-JET alums (both of which are statements you could measure with a simple employer survey).

I'd predict this has a lot to do with the Japanese government's treatment of JET members as opposed to those cheaper dispatch teachers. Dispatch teachers come over to do a job. JET members, on the other hand, have their existence acknowledged by the Japanese government and often arrive in their villages as de facto government employees, which confers much greater degrees of both respect and responsibility. They're paid well, which keeps them more comfortable.

And there's an even simpler metric: look up all the Japan specialists (current and former) from top-tier international relations grad schools. You'll get a wide pool of people: business people and entrepreneurs, journalists, nonprofit managers, international institution members (ranging from obscure UN organizations on Equal Rights for Toasters to the World Bank) and yes, policy wonks who sit on self-serving conferences like CULCON. How many are JET alums? How many are Interac alums?

I think you know my prediction.

There are petitions circulating the English-language Web, but this is really a matter for the politicians. The JET Program is a child of the LDP (the party that lost power last year and held onto power forever using a massive aggregation of local pork), and make no mistake: JET money that went to rural governments was a clever form of pork.

If I had to make a prediction about the program's fate, I bet it'll be left alone. Two reasons:

-The government is completely deadlocked, and even moreso after the Upper House election of a couple weeks ago.

-JET has been on a slow decline for about a decade as local governments unilaterally decide to go to private dispatch. If the problem will take care of itself in time, why step on a political mine?

Those of you who want to involve Japan in your professional lives, jump on the JET wagon while it's still a valued asset. We could be the last generation of professionals who get to benefit from it.

Happy is a relative thing

21 Nov 2009
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japan life rant

Life is pretty grand right now. I'm making a niche in San Diego, I've got a dream job for a research gig, I can handle the academic pressures of school, and I'm beginning to be exposed to the joys of southern California, such as lots and lots of promising concerts from artists I love.

Still:

I'd rather be in Japan. I can't spend a day without walking home from school thinking I'd rather be walking home from work somewhere in Japan, following my nose to good food and beer. And sumo on TV. And trying to understand the evening news immediately thereafter.

It's easy to be nostalgic when my life in Japan was so relatively easy, but I think what draws me most is the same thing that sent me there in the first place: the sheer unpredictability of each day. I didn't know where I'd eat, or who I'd meet doing so. I didn't know what I'd learn. For all my training, I still couldn't read a lot of the signs I'd see along the way, and they became miniature intellectual curiosities as I walked along.

And I could really go for some legit sushi right about now.

I still miss that general sensation of "I'm in a foreign land! I'm in Japan! Wowwwwww!" It's still a motivator, even after having lived there. For the last three years, I've been in Japan at least once every 8 months. I'm about to break that trend, and it's disappointing.

It's that time again...

14 Aug 2009
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japan life

I'm the kind of person who remembers things by seasons, so after something happens I'll let it go for a year and then reflect on it when that time of year comes around again.

Late July and early August is JET turnover season, and it's been fun to look at Facebook through that season. To put it simply, late July sees lots of "Goodbye!" posts (both from departing teachers-to-be and their friends in response) and for a couple weeks thereafter you see "Hello!" posts from people who just got back and want to share their new phone numbers.

Add then there's the photo albums. Whether it's the first days or the last days, it looks much the same: parties in Tokyo. Then people put together their "best of Japan" albums and it still looks the same: serene snowscapes, cherry blossoms, local temples, beaches, post-party food runs resulting in one guy passing out on the table. Their photos look like my photos, which look like any other JET alum's photos, but they're still our own for what those places and scenes meant.

My amigos' photos, even if they're not my own, take me back through all the time between "Goodbye" and "Hello." I understand the feelings, the highs and lows, the tastes. It's almost like being ex-military - there's a huge body of common experience, unique to your 'people,' to draw upon when establishing new relationships, both personal and professional

This season last year was my own turn for the "Hello!" posts, and now that it's been a full year and I'm re-established in American culture, this is the first time I can step back and look at the whole experience, from start to finish, holistically.

It was a pretty great chapter in life.

Feeling at home in Japan

22 Jun 2009
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japan life

I was last in Japan a couple of months ago, and I visited my old home of Kawamoto, in the remote mountains a couple hours away from Hiroshima.

The first time I ever experienced "returning home" was when I visited home after 6 weeks of college. My mind was blown. I very nearly forgot how to actively navigate my own home town, and I just let my hands do the steering automatically until I got to where I was going. I was like a Roomba: soon as I hit a dead end of something I knew was the wrong way, I picked a direction and turned, and repeated this process again.

That sensation dulled itself during my college career as I got used to being away from places for a long time. In Kawamoto's case, however, everything had just gone so unchanged that it was all still familiar.

There was a lot that had at least an air of newness to it, but that was from bringing my very good friend and old college roommate along for the ride. All the newness was going in his direction - I merely caught a whiff of it as I was left to knowingly smile at the discovery of the incredibly clean air, or the beauty of the natural scenery, or to laugh along with a sake-induced drunkenness.

The real shocker of the familiarity was returning to the school where I taught. Everything was working as normal, but I was removed from this process that used to involve me day in and day out. So removed, in fact, that I was welcomed with the same procedure used for guests ranging from random parents to local politicians.

It would prove impossible to do what I wanted to do: walk into the teachers' room, make rounds, offer American candy to everyone, chat it up with my old team-teacher and my replacement Jeff (who, on an aside, is a pretty cool guy).

What I got instead was a guided tour from a surprisingly hasty vice-principal, who managed my tour around the school with the same looking-over-my-shoulder closeness that visitors to North Korea get from their tour guides. From the door, we went straight past the teachers' room, into the principal's office. The principal, who once made it a point to stop by my desk and chat in an incomprehensible mix of rural Japanese and elementary Korean, spent no more than 60 seconds out of his own desk to quickly down some tea at a table across from me.

Mind you, this is a school so laid-back that teachers often start classes 5 or 10 minutes late. But now that I was no longer a cog in the works, we would not speak of such informality.

From there it was straight to the classrooms. My oldest class had just graduated, to my chagrin, so I was left with two classes of kids I knew. The younger ones had only been my students for about three months, and they were disastrous. So my visit was short-lived, but long enough to disturb the class with my mere entry. Rather than talk to the kids for a few minutes, I was relegated to the back of the room and asked not to interrupt the ongoing class.

I had completely become an outsider in this process. I was a mere observer, not an old friend who had only been gone for eight months.

My favorite kids, who were the youngest when I first started, were now the oldest. Walking into their class was a completely different story.

They screamed. They barely managed to finish the last few minutes of their class, and the instant they were given the closing bow (yes, Japanese schoolkids bow to begin and end each class) they rushed to the back of the room where Adam and I stood.

It was a short conversation, which eats me up inside. Leaving that school last August was one of the more difficult events I've ever put myself through, and to come back from halfway around the world to talk to them for 5 minutes was far too little time. They likely didn't care that I was moving to California, or that this here was my best friend Adam. There wasn't time to tell the girls whether or not I had a girlfriend, nor did the boys get to learn what the latest and greatest American video game was.

I could have conversed with those adorable little buggers for hours on end.

That's the first story. With this next one, I'll offset my emotional squishiness with some extreme geekiness:

Back in Tokyo, Adam and I were exhausted on a Saturday night and just wanted some neighborhood dinner and a couple quiet drinks. That's the kind of place where I feel most comfortable: a local hole in the wall with some very un-Tokyo quietness combined with some half-Japanese half-Western food and a nice selection of whiskey.

We walked into a place that I had liked the look of the day before, and were greeted by the sounds of Crazy Ken Band.

I know about two people anywhere in the world that appreciate CKB, so let me link you to a YouTube video to give you an idea of the sound. It's a Japanese take on funk music. It's 31 flavors of cheesy, and I love it for that. Song after song idolizes Japan's low-brow: cabarets, the Navy town of Yokosuka, muscle cars and the kind of Americana that produces motorcycles with ape-hanger handlebars and American flags. Long story short: the odds that a random 24-year-old American would walk into the bar, recognize the music, and like it are kinda slim. (Personally, I have an old Japanese TA to thank for this completely worthless knowledge.)

As Adam and I were doing the post-game report on the previous evening's festivities, I stopped him mid-sentence. The music had just changed over, and it was the third or fourth CKB song in a row. By the fifth song, it was obvious that this place was all CKB, all the time. I had to know: was this a CKB theme bar? There was a poster of the band on the wall, after all. I asked the waiter, who consulted with the bartender.

"Just for tonight," was the answer.

Huh? (In Japanese: "Ehhhhhhhhhhhh?" in a rising tone of confusion.)

"We pick a band every night and play just their stuff."

The bartender and the waiter were people I don't know and may never see again. But between the lovably cheesy soundtrack, the Japanese comfort food, the delicious whiskey and the pleasure of sharing it with one of my best amigos, I felt more at home there than at my old stomping grounds of Kawamoto Junior High.

A lot of guides introduce Japan as a nation full of such confusions. It's yin and yang at the same time. Nudity is a crime or an expectation, depending on where you are at the moment. Tokyo is the world's loudest, brightest, craziest place and yet you're never more than 40 minutes from the silence of Yoyogi Park, where the trees are thick enough to block out much of the sun.

"Home," in such a land, is a pretty relative thing.

I'm moving to...

19 Apr 2009
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career japan life

San Diego!

I committed to UCSD a couple weeks ago after visiting the campus and finding that it alone, out of my selection of four potential grad schools, had the "laid-back state school" vibe I find so familiar.

Thankfully, in the last two years I came to my senses and decided against law school, and in its stead I'll be getting a Masters in international relations.

Well, technically, International Relations and Pacific Studies. It's a clever mix of MBA-ish business work, working-level economics, high-level language training, and a smattering of other courses like Globalization and policy stuff. All of it's given a strong slant toward Pacific Rim countries, which includes Japan, China, Korea, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Long story short, it's much more my cup of tea than law school would ever be. My experience in Japan kind of slingshotted me into the gig, and most of the Japan specialists in the program are also ex-JETs like me.

It's two years of coursework with an all-but-required summer internship between the two years. There's also a chance to study abroad, which I don't know if I'll take yet, but if I do it'd be a fantastic chance to spend a semester at the University of Tokyo, which is a school for badasses.

In any case, students pick a regional specialty and a career specialty. I'll certainly be in the Japan region, but for the career stuff I'm still torn, but leaning towards International Economics. It's a pretty popular choice, and I can survive the mathematical work that seems to have plenty of people scared. Maybe I should be scared of everything else, given the lethargic pace at which I read.

Of course, there's the fantasticness of San Diego, which seems to enchant people around me with a mere mention. UCSD does have some fabulous scenery, and the IR buildings actually sit right above the ocean. I've had more people than I can count promise to come visit me. Oddly, when I was there I wasn't blown away by any of the scenery or ocean proximity, but in all fairness I was exhausted from my travel and still getting over the ugly shock of a city that was Los Angeles.

I take off sometime in July. In the meantime I'm doing all the playing and traveling I can, so hopefully I'll be visiting you soon!

Back to Japan!

25 Mar 2009
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japan travel time

I'm going to Japan once more! I'm taking my dear friend Adam along for the ride, and he's been studying Japanese really hard, so let's show him a good time, eh?

Details:
April 9-12: Tokyo
April 12-13: Shimane (one night only! Staying in Kawamoto)
April 13-15: Tokyo, with possible stops along the San-Yo Shinkansen on the 13th (for those of you in Kyoto, for example..)

I'm going to bring my American cell, so my mail address is
blakeellison@gmail.com

and my phone number will be American. We'll have a rental keitai on hand in case we need an actual phone number.

Your good friend and mine Jason Smith will also be joining us for parts of the trip. We're hoping to have a big UT get together on April the 10th, so be ready to party!

This note is going on Facebook as well, so the Japanese version follows. Readers of my blog, you can skip this. :)

日本語

すぐ日本にまいりま〜す！　親友の友達のアダムさんと二人で行くし、彼はせっかく日本語を勉強してるからちょっと練習させたらお世話になる。：）

僕たちは４月の９日に着いて、１２日まで東京を回っていく。１０日はみんなのオースティンの人とパーティーしたいと思います！　因みに、みんなさんのいい友達のジェイソンさんも来るからぜひ来てください！

１２日の上、１２・１３日は島根県にちょっと訪問。残念ながら、川本町しか行けない。１３日に東京に帰って来て、１５日まで東京で遊ぶつもり。

僕は自分のアイフォンを持って来るから、メアッドは昔のじゃなくて、新しいのはblakeellison@gmail.com。アメリカの番号から電話があったら、私です！　別の携帯をレンタルするから日本の電話番号もあるんでしょう。

それで、また会いましょう！