Access Denied

February 20

Today was my short day once again in which I went to Japanese class and had nothing further to attend. I had been thinking about buying a Nintendo DS long before the dictionary adventure and since it was the only other expensive item that I wanted to get, I figured that I might as well go for it. I decided to go on this adventure alone since I had been aided by my friends for all of my other ones.

I made my way down to the KS Electronics store to make my purchase. Once arriving in the store, I asked an employee where the Nintendo DS was located. He explained that the store does not sell games, which was strange to hear since a few aisles over there were computer games. He probably meant that they don't sell hand-held games. From that point, my adventure became more interesting after I decided to try going back to Yodobashi Camera in Osaka.

When I reached Hirakata Station, I began carefully inspecting the signs for the correct station. It was easy to find the train that I wanted. At the next station, I followed the crowd of people over to the next train line where I again inspected the signs to ensure my smooth transition to Osaka. Once reaching Osaka, I went out of the north gate which I recalled led to the store.

After my flawless journey, I arrived at the store and proceded up to the proper floor. I asked one of the employees if the Japanese Nintedo DS could play games made in America. After obtaining an affirmative answer, I asked how I might go about acquiring one such unit. It was at this time that I was informed that the eight story department store supercenter was completely sold out of the device in question. Completely astounded, shocked, and sullenly disappointed, I decided to make my way back home since I had no idea what to do by myself in a big city.

The trip back proved to be quite the contrary to the trip there. There were twelve different platforms that went to the same loop, but none of them displayed any familiar names. After walking around looking for anything that I missed, I gave up and asked a Japanese guy who was standing around. He explained that I wanted platform 2 and then insisted that he take me to the proper train. I was astounded, shocked, and pleasantly impressed that a person with no obligation or reason to help a stranger would go to such lengths just to lend a hand. On the way to the platform, we attempted to communicate about my reason to be in Japan. I couldn't explain much more than that I was a student at Kansai Gaidai and by the time that I could no longer understand his questions, we were at the platform. He showed me to the train and we bid farewell.

Switching trains was much easier than finding the first one. This time, there were actually signs with the station name on them. Once getting back to the station, I took the 45 minute walk back to the dorm.

After dinner, I decided not to let this day be for naught. I began looking on eBay and other various stores for the DS. It seemed that all of the eBay deals had high shipping costs, but some were acceptable. The problem was that Paypal would not let me enter an address outside of the US, so I could not buy a DS from eBay. All other stores that I found would only ship to the US. By the advise of my dormmate Will who purchased a DS online, I went to Amazon Japan to purchase one. The price was slightly higher than it was in the department store, but it was apparent that the extra price was for the availability. This too proved to be difficult, as I could not type the entire address in Roman characters since it would not fit. Therefore, I had to type it all in kanji which took a while since I did not know what all of the characters were called.

After finally finishing my order, I retired to study for my Japanese test on the next day. It appeared that the study material was at a slightly higher difficulty than what we had done in class, so I figured that we were in for a treat the next day.