See You in the Funny Pages

So there's this shogi museum in my town that just had its grand opening over the weekend and apparently, it's a very big deal. For those of you who don't know, shogi is essentially the Japanese version of chess. As far as I can gather, there have been a number of famous shogi matches played here in Momoishi and to commemorate that fact, they decided to build a museum. The museum itself is really nice and has all this high tech stuff, the coolest of which is a fake tatami room with a shogi set-up onto which video projectors project a very dramatic presentation about one of Oyama Yasuharu's most famed matches (a statue of him playing shogi, pictured above, sits at the entrance to the museum). Having said that, though, it's basically a museum about chess, so it's pretty damn boring.

Anyway, while I was over there they brought in some reporter from the town newsletter type thing to photograph me. We then went back to the office where he interviewed me (I guess there's going to be an article about me in the next issue?). Every time I had difficulty expressing myself in Japanese he told me that it was okay to speak in English but every time I complied it became quite clear that he didn't understand a word that I was saying, so I stuck with Japanese mostly. I'll try to get my hands on a copy when it comes out so that I can scan it or whatever, it should be pretty funny.

You would have to be some kind of fool to mess around with my right speaker because it is being guarded by the king of monsters.