I started the day intending to go to the Japan War Responsibility Center. It is a center that was established by the Japan-China Friendship Foundation, and I thought it would be a good place to research and discuss and gather ideas about how different attitudes in Japan are trying to reconcile with actions perpetrated during World War II.
After my success in finding the performance space the previous night, I thought I would be adventurous, and see if I can make it two for two in finding Japanese addresses. I looked on the website for the location of the space, and even wrote down a couple of phone numbers just in case. That part should have had me a bit hesitant, that there were two phone numbers to write down. One was from their English website, and the other was from the Japanese website. Furthermore, the English website had an address, but the Japanese one did not. I suppose a more intelligent person would have first called to make sure where I was going, and if the place was even open. Well, I'm not a more intelligent person, so I just set out.
I got out at the proper train station and supposed that the location was nearby. I experienced the same troubles finding the address as I did the previous night. But I had time to kill, and I was up for a fun adventure, so it was fine. After about a half hour hunting from here to there, I finally found the address. The ground floor was a grocery market, and I looked up to see if there was a sixth floor; luckily there was, so perhaps I was in the right place.
When I went into the lobby of the building (behind the grocery market), I asked the guy if there was anything in suite 607, but he said there was no suite 607. He looked at the address I had written down, and supposed that it might be the next building over. I wasn't confident that would be the case, but I went anyway. Indeed, it was apartments, and again, there was no suite 607.
Perhaps I had interpretted the address in reverse order, but after finding the other block, I saw that the numbers didn't match up, so... I decided to call it quits, and found an off the kilter bookstore. It was fun to see alternative books and comics and toys that weren't prominently displayed (if displayed at all) at the big bookstores. I found a comic by one of my favorite alternative manga artists, and bought it. I picked this one because it was perhaps one of the more recent ones, and the clerk informed me that it was signed by him. Cool.
Trying to give the Japan-China Friendship Society one more go, I found a payphone near the train station and called one of the numbers. When the person answered the phone, I first asked if she spoke English. She didn't. It is a lot easier communicating with someone face-to-face if they don't speak too much English, and I don't speak too much Japanese, but over the phone, I had no idea where to begin, so I just repeated my decision to quit. I had already found a very informative museum in Osaka that expressed ideas from a similar side of the spectrum, and I wondered if they would be able to give me material that would help my research much, anyway, seeing as how I was illiterate in Japanese.
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