I thought I'd check out the Japanese equivalent of Facebook the other day, called Mixi. I've known about it for a while, even when I was back in Australia, but never bothered to check it out because it's all in kanji. A couple of my JET friends here were talking about it the other day, and saying that it was pretty cool, so I finally bit the bullet and had a look. Apparently it has over 10 million members, which is about one thirteenth of Japan. Not bad! Unfortunately, it turns out that it's really, really hard to get an account for it. It's been made this way by requiring that a) you're invited onto it, you can't just sign up, b) you can read or at least translate kanji/hiragana and c) you have a working Japanese keitai email address. So basically you have to live in Japan and theoretically be able to read Japanese :)

Initially I had no chance but to give up because I had no invitation, but to my infinite surprise, a few days ago an invitation arrived in my inbox. It was from one of the people I'd met on MHP. I was surprised, but really happy, and quickly signed up (with the help of Yahoo's Japanese translator). Actually, quick side story, the girl who invited me is also really serious about this language exchange thing. I wrote a message to her the other day and she emailed a PDF of it back to me, with her corrections and suggestions all over it. I was like ... wow ... I barely know her and she's willing to do that. I'd been really finicky about correcting her English though, so I guess it's fair enough :) I hope she keeps wanting to do this, as I think I learnt more from that PDF than last month's JET Japanese book.

Back to mixi, I finally got onto it after beating my head against a brick wall with the registration process, haha. Once you've put in all your details, it sends confirmation emails to both your email address and mobile phone. Your mixi account isn't activated until you click the confirmation links within each of these emails. This sounds easy enough, but I hit some difficulties. The interesting thing I found out is that Japanese mobile phones can send their 'serial number' along with all requests for mobile websites. I turn this off for security reasons (I like to minimise my presence online), but mixi requires it. So after some confusion as to why on earth I couldn't do the keitai confirmation, I turned it back on and re-visited the site. Presto, I'm now on mixi, hooray! :)

I spent some time mucking around with it yesterday afternoon, translating the site and setting up my profile. I don't understand much of it, but my trusty dictionaries and the Yahoo translator work wonders :) I'm no speed demon on there, but I get by. So far I've only been messaged by one person, who seems a little crazy, haha. I like crazy. She lives in Miyazaki prefecture, which is on Kyuushuu, Japan's southern island. It's really great, meeting random people like this. I've talked to a few in Tokyo and they've all said that if I go up, they'll show me around. It's nice to have people like that and to know that if I ever do go anywhere in Japan, someone I know at least a little is probably never too far away and can help me out.

Actually, on the spare of the moment, I thought I'd do a search for people in Ako and found 1,295 of them. When I limited my search to 22 to 26 year olds, 312 results come back. Which, amusingly, is probably pretty much the entire population of 22 to 26 year olds in Ako, haha. Still, that's pretty cool. Their community is really hard to get into (finding where they hang out is hard enough, butting into their conversations is even harder still). At least now, I have a way to try to osmosis my way in and meet some without totally interrupting them or freaking them out :) We'll see what happens. Anyway, it's all good - and I've found me something else to do at school ;D