Will Miss #389 - civilized behavior in theaters

Since I haven't been to an American movie theater in over two decades, I had forgotten how badly behaved that some people can be. Often the absence of a bad experience does not register as a necessarily good one. I hadn't thought about how people do extremely rude things in movie theaters in the U.S. until I saw some FaceBook updates about people who talked loudly, kicked the back of seats,

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Will Miss #318 - laughing in all the "wrong" places

Seeing an English language movie in Japan can be a surreal experience, particularly if it is a comedy. The movie you are watching may look like the same one that the Japanese patrons are viewing, but in reality you are having a somewhat different experience. While you are following along in your native tongue, the Japanese are following the subtitles; these do not often say the same things as

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Will Miss #295 - collectible movie tickets

Yes, it's a terrible picture... it was taken through the window of a display case at night.
Movie tickets in America are usually boring affairs. Either they are generic with text or computer print-outs. In Japan, there are boring tickets, but you can also buy pretty cool looking ones with a picture from the movie on it. They serve as a much more attractive reminder of your experiences and are

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Will Miss #285 - La Puta posters

There is a theater in my area which shows vintage Japanese movies. For some reason, they put up a poster on a back street which is the most common path for me to follow to get to local grocery shops. It's an odd place for a poster which advertises old Japanese movies because it would seem foot traffic would hardly bring in a substantial number of patrons, but I love the fact that they are there.

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Won't Miss #254 - overheated movie theaters

While it is great to be able to eat and drink what you want in movie theaters in Japan, there is one big problem, and that's the temperature. Most theaters are uncomfortably hot in both summer and winter. In the winter, they overheat them and in summer, they under-cool them. Part of the reason for this is that Japanese people in general prefer hotter temperatures than foreigners, but part of it

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Will Miss #253 - taking my own snacks to movies

In the U.S., most theater owners will not permit people to bring in their own food and drink. This allows them to massively overcharge at the concessions stand and make more money. In Japan, you can nosh on anything you want inside the theater. That's right. People take in bags of fast food to eat during the movie if they want and nobody hassles them.

I'll miss being able to take what I want to

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Will Miss #198 - Japanese movie posters

One of my husband's and my most prized possessions from our stay in Japan is a Monty Python and the Holy Grail Japanese movie poster. Perhaps we're giant dorks, but the movie posters having Japanese writing on them just makes them cooler to us. Of course, the poster designs are also different from those back home in many cases. We've got a collection of movie posters that we have bought since

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Won't Miss #196 - no English Subtitles

If you see a movie like "Avatar" or "Lord of the Rings", there are made-up languages used during certain points of the movie. Even though the movie is in English, there is no way to understand fictional languages without subtitles (unless you're a big geek and speak fluent Elvish). Even if you read Japanese fast enough or well enough, it is disruptive to your enjoyment of the movie to be torn

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