Hosono Shigeru
and the
Scanner
of
Doom

SYNOPSIS:  This is a page dedicated to Shigeru, my friend from the Yakuba who trades music and books with me and, through the use of his scanner and digital camera, is the man who makes these pages work.

    Shigeru is certainly one of my best friends in Japan.  He's a really cool guy and I find out more and more about him all the time.  We have one of those relationships where we both gain a lot just by sitting around, shooting the shit and telling stories.

    I forget how we first met- it was at the Yakuba some time before that Enkai, maybe in regards to me needing help finding a good Internet Service.  But after the Enkai we actually started hanging out and talking outside of the office.  Usually he picks me up at my house, we go someplace (electronics store, food, music store, etc), and then go back to his house.  Sometimes his girlfriend Ritsuko comes with.  Anyway, at his place we usually just hang out- talking, listening to music, playing Soul Edge on Playstation, or messing around on his computer.  He can speak English very well, so it's rather easy to talk to him.  If a word comes up that one of us doesn't understand, we can usually work out the meaning without using a dictionary.  Also, he loves music and movies-  His favorite band is Jamiriquois (again I know I'm spelling it wrong) from back in the day, and he apparently spent 1/3 of his college career subtitling movies into Japanese- he's a big movie fan, so we can really relate to each other.  As for himself, he likes using computers.  Actually, he and his brother, if you added their computers together, have the system equivalent of the Computer Center at my small liberal-arts college.  They both have Macs, zip drives, Magnetic-Optical drives, color ink/laser printers, a digital camera, a digital video camera, a scanner, internet access, and Shigeru knows how to do almost anything with Adobe Photoshop, so he can really crank out some cool shit.  Look for some of the things he's made either in the Stories or Perihelion pages later.
 
    Anyway, Shigeru is 26 and he works at the Yakuba at the Section of Social Education.  He's a writer- he's written several novels that I really wish I could read, and says that he's working at the Yakuba because it's relatively stress-free, and gives his job gives him a lot of free time, which he uses to travel, to relax, or to write.  He really wants to become a professional writer, and sees his job at the yakuba as giving him the space that he needs (as well as the money to eat) to pursue that goal.  I was totally overwhelmed when he told me that- most Japanese I know don't have ambitions past the day-to-day (Another one of my friends told me that Japanese generally have "small dreams"  I didn't know if the word he was using for 'small' indicated 'worthless' or 'short-sighted', but I think he meant the latter).  So he's up there with the friends that I totally have respect for.

    Actually, there was something about Shigeru that I found compelling, but I couldn't put my finger on the reason why.  At first, I thought it was because he was a writer (I have a dreamy, hazy kind of respect for writers), but that alone wasn't it.  Anyway, last week at the Azuma Village Sports Festival, I finally realized the reason why I found Shigeru so compelling- his face.  His face looks

exactly like one of my favorite actors (favorite in a corny kind of way), Bruce Campell.  Anyway, Bruce Campbell is one handsome guy.  Very compelling.  I don't know, maybe they were seperated at birth or something.
BTW-If you want to find out more on Bruce Campbell, just type in his name on Yahoo- there's so many fanpages out there that there's no point in creating a link here.

    Finally, Hosono is helping me translate this awesome Japanese manga that I like but can barely read called Mugen no Jyuunin (Resident of Infinity).  If you want to see what that's all about, click HERE.