Imai-san's Farewell Party
(November 28, 1995)
Last night (and this morning) I attended Imai-san's farewell party. Imai
is/was a co-worker of mine, and is a great guy. He's heading to the UK to
work for Sharp at their Oxford location, and will be there (with his wife
and 2 young children) for 4-5 years.
So, of course, we threw a party for him :-)
Sato-kun organized this to be at a traditional shabu-shabu type restaurant
(the kind where you cook your own food in the boiling water) for about 25
people (mainly Sharp people). It's located in Nara (very near to the train
station, a couple of video palours and a movie theatre {that's showing
another Sailor Moon movie it looks like, along with the latest from the US})
The bill per person was 6000yen ($60US which is kinda expensive IMHO,
although I guess this also included almost unlimited amounts of drinks).
I got a ride with Nakagawa, who took Imai, Ichikawa and I via some good
backroads at around 6:00pm. While waiting for everyone to arrive (we made
good time and got there at about 6:30) we all went into the local arcade and
tried out a 3 player game of Sega Rally (I came 2nd by a hair to Ichikawa...
bleah) and watched Imai play a volleyball spike game (a ball gets launched
in the air, and the player tries to get it over a net past a couple of
plastic hands).
The food was good, Ichikawa-san was his happy self (he reminds me of Justin
when he gets drunk :-) ), and Imai-san went between the tables (in
traditional Japanese style he described) to chat with everybody.
After that fun feast (where we were kidding Otani's wife wondering why she
wanted to look like Harrison Ford :-) ) at around 10:00 we went for the
traditional next activity, karaoke! (of course...)
15 people were left for this, and we filled 3 rooms. This karaoke was
different than the last one I went to, since it's a sega model which can
'rate' how well you sing. I haven't a clue how it does it, but a polygon
face while you're singing will smile, oooh, frown, or laugh depending on how
well you follow the lyrics (I suppose) and you get a score at the end. I
got a 72 for Hotel California for instance :-) The group Bohemian Rapsody
was a joke though..
The amount of songs to choose from are amazingly large actually. The
Japanese songs fill most the book of course (a couple of thousand I believe)
although the English songs are respectable (everything from Go West to Puff
the Magic Dragon). There's even a large Anime song section (at the last
place with a small group I got people to sing along with my 'tonari no
totoro' :-) ), and one person did a great song from an old mecha show.
After this venture (it's 450yen per person per hour, and we did it for 2
hours), it was midnight and since everybody was in a silly mood, the 9
remaining people went to a traditional Tempura bar.
I had some gin and tonic equivalent (the closest thing to ginger ale I've
tasted) that almost everybody else had, along with random things tempuraed
(hey, it sounds like a good word :-) ). Then around 1:45 George was heading
back, so I decided to tag along (since this was a Monday now today, and I
liked the idea of getting some sleep). So I wished Imai-san the best, made
sure he would e-mail me all his contact information, and headed out.
So that's my evening/morning :-)
-MJ
"Nothing like getting 3 hours sleep :-) "
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