how to buy a ticket to Takarazuka ~ a crush of dreams?

the new year marked a new stage in Zuka tickets. finally Zuka understood it should not be weaker than any other service in terms of selling their tickets. the web-ticket system was upgraded noticeably! what are the major innovations?

innovation #1

as you can see, the days of the week are written in Russian! yeah, there in the brackets. does Takarazuka aim to become more foreigner-friendly step by step???

innovation #2
the answer is NO. why? now it requires a login. is login that bad?

login itself is not. registration is. the problem is not that the process became a bit more complicated - Google translator or someone who knows can help you with the Japanese language. what really seems to be a big hinder is that you will need to write your ADDRESS in Japan. including index, prefecture, city, building, etc. and your phone number, as usual. previously you only had to write your phone number. here, as always, you have an alternative. you can either ask your Japanese friend (what? you love Takarazuka and you do not even possess a bunch of kind Japanese friends???) to lend you his/her address and phone number - I did this with phone number only last time. OR - you can deceive the system. yeah, just find a random address and put it in. what are the consequences? I have NO idea. however, at least I knew that phone number was only necessary when you go to pick up your ticket as one of the numbers of confirmation. address - what is it used for? this requires a long and boring process of reading the rules. remember 'tis Japan we are speaking about. if you ask directly - you will be told to use an address of a person you know. no one is even suspecting you would use an address you picked up in Google maps. what if you say nothing? haha, you can try if you dare. I dare not. guess I will have a few fun hours trying to understand why address is so important. if it comes to the pinch, I guess I have people whom I can ask to use their address, but one can never be sure, huh?

translation tricks. part 1 ~ from 'maid-sama'

reading manga in the original has been my dream for a long time. 'twas 'unaffordable' for me who knew only a few kanji to read 'fluently' (haha) and was too lazy to search them up in the dictionary every time. to be honest, this has not changed since those times, but now I am lucky to have manga where almost all the kanji have furigana... so my dream has finally come true

and I must say there is much more pleasure in doing so because of the widespread language tricks. the first time I noticed them was while watching Di Gi Charat, and since then I have been a huge fan of such tricks. this time I am fascinated by their use in KwMs, of course

'foolish couple'

a tag name Aoi gave to Misa and Usui consists of the word 'baka' meaning 'fools' and 'kappuru' which comes from English 'couple'. joining them together, he made this - 'bakappuru' which was never rendered in the translations (either in manga scanlations or in anime subtitles). this time I feel I must not complain or blame the translators because this is a really hard point, and I doubt any English equivalent can be found. therefore, it only increases the value of reading the original for me

'perverted tiger'

'twas Usui who called Igarashi a 'perverted big bro', but do not forget that his name - Tora - is written as 'tiger'. combining the words 'pervert' - 'hentai' - and another variant of 'tiger' - 'taiga-', Fujiwara-sensei makes a new alias for Igarashi - 'hentaiga-'. nice, Fujiwara-sensei!

this page is a 'readers request' from the manga volume, in other words - not published in LaLa. well, as far as I understand...? therefore, translators did not use it. however, if they did - I wonder what could they do? what could I do if I had to cope with it? probably nothing apart from the explanation I did in the previous paragraph

'a failure of a maid'
ダメイド　in Japanese - a combination of 'dame' - 'useless' - and 'meido' - 'maid'. nice, Fujiwara-sensei! ^.^

'Three Idiots Cafe'

no, the sign does not say this. it says 'Sun Vaca cafe'... but do not forget the peculiarities of the Japanese phonetic system. 'sun' would be pronounced as 'san', 'vaca' as 'baka'. what we get finally is 'sanbaka'. yeah, 'three idiots'

explanation of shanshan phenomenon by Matsumoto-san ^.^

for a reason unknown I doubt the facts Matsumoto-san utters are truth... but they sound real. and... why not?

in the video ↓ he kindly explained some facts about 'shanshan'

according to Matsumoto-san, the word was invented by some 'grannies' who attended 'Arabian Night' in 1950 and expressed their fascination with the shanshans which had bells attached to them. therefore, the onomatopoetic word 'shanshan' refers not to the rustling of the shanshans or anything else, and not the 'motion of waving the objects' as TakaWiki says, but to the sound of small bells. the word Matsumoto-san used is 'suzu' which means not the bells that are sonorous and have a particular pitch, but those like Santa-san has (that, when together, make a sound closer to a noise, than to music)

before that, this object was called simply 小道具 - 'stage properties' or gadgets

and the length of the ribbon should be precisely 2.2 metres. yep. 'twas written is some explanatory book but I did not grasp, where exactly. Matsumoto-san guesses that this length is fixed like this because the line it makes is the most beautiful, and thus a triangle is created: the face, the shanshan body and the left hand with ribbon... well, sounds credible

p. s. I know this is completely wrong, but I feel a bit happy for the fact that 'Arabian Night' of 1950 was a Moon performance. ok, ok, this is not the Moon I know and love, and this could happen with any Troupe, and this is not fair because Cosmos did not exist those times, and finally - what Matsumoto-san says may be untrue to some extent... but I am a bit happy