Original (2008/04/30): Bamboo Thicket | Kitayume (archive.is)
Blog Mirror: “Why Americans Love Spring”
Scanlation: kawaiipinay
Translation Source: LJ Post
■Why Americans Love Spring■
Read both columns simultaneously.
Japan is enjoying the four seasons far too much.
【The Climate That Feints】
The view of America’s climate from inside a room can really differ
from what you feel when you actually go out.
There are plenty of days in spring that, even though from your house
it might look like a cheerful spring day, the wind is murderous-level cold.
Severe cold, severe heat, severe dry spells, warm earth + hurricanes
America’s climate scale is huge and broad.
【Gratitude for 24-Hour Konbini】
In America, there are individually run delis but there aren’t really any 24-hour konbini-like stores.
If you go to the countryside, they generally close around 7PM
so on days where you don’t have a car on a winter night and your light bulbs or food rations run out,
your two choices are to either do nothing but endure it or go into the city using sheer will-power.
Totally wild.
【America’s Heating】
Because a building is warmed by one boiler, you can’t control the temperature,
and there are days when it’s too hot and days when it’s too cold,
American heating is miserable.
【Siren】
When you play it in a bright room bustling with people, the shibito look cute,
but when you play it in a dark room by yourself, you get scared
and go to the bathroom or you become frightened when you hear small noises.
【Games that When I Finally Noticed, I Had Two Of】
Without knowing why, I did it.
By the way, the sequence of events is this strip → America’s Situation with Ghosts.
Afterwards, when I once more tried the “Siren” that I tried once,
couldn’t clear and left alone, the interesting shibito became cute to me.
[T/N: 1. Year end cleaning, Osechi-ryouri, pounding mochi – all traditions of a typical Japanese New Year. The grunts that Japan makes while he pounds the mochi are stereotypically made by old men.
2. Kurikinton – mashed sweet potatoes with chestnuts. It痴 a traditional component of osechi-ryouri.
3. Harumi-chan – one of the characters of Siren. I’ve never played the game, so someone tell me if the background music sounds as weird as Himaruya-sensei wrote it. By the way, the “zombies” in the game are referred to as shibito (corpse people).
4. Jump and ice cream – Just in case people were wondering, Japan’s talking about Shuukan Shounen Jump (the weekly magazine that serializes One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, etc.)
5. Giving into temptation – I’m thinking Japan bought a meat bun? (Japan, please mind your sodium intake!)
6. Honyararara – I’m not entirely sure of the meaning of this one. According to this site, “honyarara” was a famous game show host’s way of censoring the correct answer to a question…?
7. Demons out! – Japan is performing mamemaki, a ritual of Setsubun/Risshun.
8. Middle school- The Japanese school calendar has students graduating in March (as opposed to America’s May/June graduations)
9. Dango, viewing the sakura – all traditions associated with spring in Japan.
10. Changes in the volume 2 version of this comic: the comic for Volume 2 is a redrawn version with slight changes (mostly to do with Himaruya-sensei cleaning up his terrible handwriting and adding tones), but the dialogue is pretty much the same word for word. The only author’s notes included in the book is the “Gratitude for 24-hour Konbini” section, though.]