Ｈａｒｒｙ Ｐｏｔｔｅｒ Ｔｉｍｅｓ

Kate, being the Harry Potter fanatic that she is, reserved advance movie tickets at the local 7-11, for us to see The Half-Blood Prince. The $13 price tag was much lower than the usual $20, and the group reservation ensured that our assigned seats would be together. Japanese theaters have one rule: Absolute Silence. When I was little, my mom invented The Quiet Game, which was quite effective for 6 rowdy children, the quietest kid for the longest amount of time wins. That audience took the Quiet Game, added a Japanese twist, and took Silence to the 5th power. People chew the proverbial popcorn cud slowly and deliberately, with a massive amount of attention paid to not making any crunch noises. There is no way that anyone can finish a bag of popcorn in just two hours chewing time. Straw sucking is slow and painful, like someone with strep throat. When we entered the pin-drop silent theater, I was to be honest, slightly thrilled at the prospect of skipping stones across the placid sea of movie-goers. We show up, scream, laugh, giggle, jump and react in the way a movie was meant to be enjoyed, and in the end, we clap. Our 6 person clap was promptly drowned by the vast sea of silence. But we were still proud of our stone skipping. We left the theater and my Japanese friends were laughing as they came up to greet us. They said that although the theater was dark, they knew where we were at all times. They could have closed their eyes and found us using sonar waves. I don’t know how it’s possible not to react if something pops out at you; maybe that’s why Japanese movies are the scariest in the world. They need to be in order to elicit some sort of reaction.