I promised posts and here we are.
Still having problems uploading piccies though, grrrr.
So instead I have something special to share with you all.
This is a video of an artist called Angela Aki singing a song called "Tegami Haikei Juugo no Kimi e" or "Letter to my 15 year old self".
Tegami means letter in Japanese and the song is a letter from the singers 15 year old self to her future self despite what the name would imply. The future self reads the letter and reflects back on difficult times and how the important thing is to keep struggling on with life.
It is the most recent song I have encountered that unerringly makes me start crying for reasons I cannot quite articulate.
I found a translation of the lyrics online here.
Greetings,
You who are reading this, where are you and what are you doing now?
I’m 15 and there’s something worrying me
That I can’t talk to anyone about
But if I address a letter to my future self
Then I know I’ll be able to speak my mind
I feel like giving up now, I feel like crying, I feel like I’m going to disappear
Whose words should I trust as I move forward?
My one and only heart has broken into pieces time and time again
And I’m living through painful times now
I’m living in the present
Greetings,
Thank you, I have something to tell your 15 year old self
If you keep asking yourself why and where you should go
The answer will become clear
The seas of adolescence can be rough
But keep sailing the boat that is your dream towards tomorrow’s shore
Don’t give up now, don’t cry, when you feel like you’re going to disappear
Then you should trust your own voice and move forward
Even an adult like me gets hurt and has sleepless nights
But I’m living in the bittersweet present
Everything in life has meaning
So don’t be afraid to follow your dream
Keep on believing
I feel like giving up now, I feel like crying, I feel like I’m going to disappear
Whose words should I trust as I move forward?
Ah, don’t give up now, don’t cry, when you feel like you’re going to disappear
Then you should trust your own voice and move forward
No matter what stage of your life you’re in
You can’t get by without going through sadness
Show me a smile, let’s live in the present
Let’s live in the present
Greetings,
I pray that you who are reading this
Will be happy
Not the finest poetry in the world ever but decent enough considering it has rendered into a foreign language. And whilst I can agree with the sentiment the words themselves do not move me.
Rather it is Angela Aki's performance that gives the words life, even in a foreign language the pained expressions and the mixture of joy and sorrow are immediate and clear. It is a beautiful performance, trying to be histrionic but always just enough
restrained that it avoids being whiny.
Aki is an Italian-American/ Japanese singer songwriter (oddly her Dad is the owner of the English language school AEON). She has had some success with English audiences but she is huge in Japan. I only recently discovered her as a singer but I had come across the song before. Every year schools hold a chorus contest between classes and this year one of my classes decided to sing Tegami. The songs are all invariably from the "enka" genre of music. Basically Japanese folk music veering into singer/songwriter territory. It's not really my thing and thus something I don't pay much attention to but I did like this song. In fact it was my favourite of the day, despite being sung in a language I didn't understand and by amateurs.
I didn't think much of it until I heard this video whilst waiting in Tsutaya (a video rental shop) and I was blown away. Aki's performance just lifts the song out of the usual singer/songwriter whiny syrupiness and makes it soar.
She has swiftly risen to become my favourite Japanese language singer (sorry Gackt).
It helps that she's gorgeous too.
She can do English too. This is her version of the ending theme to Final Fantasy VIII.
Showing posts with label Video Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Games. Show all posts
Monday, 9 March 2009
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Unplanned Video Filler
Sorry guys but both my camera and my SD card are elsewhere as I type this so I have little recourse but to do a quicky video post.
Real posts to resume next week gang.
I'll start us off with this marvellous tribute to Super Mario Bros rendered through Japanese puppetry. With roots in bunraku,a style of puppet theatre, modenr Japanese puppetry probably provides the most spectacular special effects that can actually be done on a stage. Recreating something as abstract and cartoony as the world of Super Mario in real life is an amazing artistic achievement.
Funny as hell too.
Excel Saga is a "Quack Experimental Anime." Basically a surreal comedy series that satirises anime tropes and in which anything can happen. The series is loosely about the ideological organisation ACROSS, a severely understaffed super villain outfit that aims to eventually conquer the world but for now is focused on just conquering F city F prefecture. the staff consists of Excel, a hyper-fast talking, energetic but hopeless idiot and Hyatt, a naive alien girl who dies every episode (beating kenny to the punch by a few years). There's also a mad paedophile scientist, a poor doomed dog called menchi and many other hilarious characters.
The theme tune's lyrics were apparently written by the director on the train ride to the recording studio to record the theme and bear no relation to the plot whatsoever. Good sight gags though.
The end theme is rather brilliantly sung by Menchi.
The title of the song is "and so you are going to eat me."
In contrast to Menchi's eventual fate, to be eaten by Excel as an emergency food supply, Chi, the star of "Chi's Sweet Home" gets, well, a sweet home. This anime, about a stray cat adopted by a family and told from the cat's point of view is without question the cutest anime ever made and possibly the cutest thing on the planet.
I should note that the subtitles on this version are not especially good as they editorialise far too much to make the English seem more natural. However it is the only embeddable version of the song that I could find.
Better post on Saturday I promise.
Real posts to resume next week gang.
I'll start us off with this marvellous tribute to Super Mario Bros rendered through Japanese puppetry. With roots in bunraku,a style of puppet theatre, modenr Japanese puppetry probably provides the most spectacular special effects that can actually be done on a stage. Recreating something as abstract and cartoony as the world of Super Mario in real life is an amazing artistic achievement.
Funny as hell too.
Excel Saga is a "Quack Experimental Anime." Basically a surreal comedy series that satirises anime tropes and in which anything can happen. The series is loosely about the ideological organisation ACROSS, a severely understaffed super villain outfit that aims to eventually conquer the world but for now is focused on just conquering F city F prefecture. the staff consists of Excel, a hyper-fast talking, energetic but hopeless idiot and Hyatt, a naive alien girl who dies every episode (beating kenny to the punch by a few years). There's also a mad paedophile scientist, a poor doomed dog called menchi and many other hilarious characters.
The theme tune's lyrics were apparently written by the director on the train ride to the recording studio to record the theme and bear no relation to the plot whatsoever. Good sight gags though.
The end theme is rather brilliantly sung by Menchi.
The title of the song is "and so you are going to eat me."
In contrast to Menchi's eventual fate, to be eaten by Excel as an emergency food supply, Chi, the star of "Chi's Sweet Home" gets, well, a sweet home. This anime, about a stray cat adopted by a family and told from the cat's point of view is without question the cutest anime ever made and possibly the cutest thing on the planet.
I should note that the subtitles on this version are not especially good as they editorialise far too much to make the English seem more natural. However it is the only embeddable version of the song that I could find.
Better post on Saturday I promise.
Friday, 27 June 2008
6 Things That are Great About Japan
I'm feeling fairly positive today despite having a bloody terrible week. So let's examine some of the wonderful things about my country.
1. The Wildlife
This is one of those things I love about Japan that came as a complete surprise to me. You probably know that the southern coast of Japan is basically one huge metropolis. From Tokyo down to Hiroshima it’s all city, with no real gaps in between.
However while Japan is famous for it’s metropolises it’s easy to lose sight of why it is so densely urbanised. There is very little space where people can live and build and nearly all of it has already been re-claimed. This leaves an awful lot of space that is simply left over to nature. It’s easy to forget this when you’re surrounded on all sides by grey concrete stretching up to block the sun but it takes about an hour’s walk for me to get from my flat in a built up town and major transport link to a forest up a mountain.
Because of this there is a lot of large native wildlife in Japan. Far more than what I am used to in Britain. I have seen more large birds of prey in the year I have lived here than I have ever seen in my entire life before. I sit by a pond filled with turtles, everyday when I wait for the bus (which is also where I twice saw a snake), there are far more butterflies here than Britain, there are fearless little sparrows that bother you whenever you sit down and there are entrancing dragonflies and deeply irritating cicadas.
In fact let’s not get started on the bugs because if I do this quickly won’t be a “things I like about Japan” entry. Suffice it to say the butterflies and dragonflies are lovely and leave it there.
And these aren’t just limited to the forests but are a day to day part of life. However what does live in the forest are some truly amazing animals, wild boars, poisonous snakes, tanuki (sort of raccoon dogs) and bears. Bears! I never knew Japan had bears.
Mario here, dressed as a tanuki.
Living in Britain it is easy to forget about the natural world as bar trees and pigeons it hardly ever intrudes upon the everyday of life. British people may decry me for this because Britain ahs some of the greenest cities of any developed country. However the point is not so much the flowers and the grass but the animals. There aren’t really any animals jostling for space with people in Britain, bar birds, domesticated animals and bugs. Here exotic and interesting animals are something I see everyday and they're one of the things I will miss most when I leave Japan.
2. Unicycles
Yes, unicycles. Yes, the bikes with only one wheel.
For whatever reason (and frankly I couldn’t even begin to guess why) unicycles are massively more popular in Japan than they are in pretty much every other country in the world.
Primary school kids in Japan are taught how to ride unicycles. In fact I think some schools have unicycles that the students can practice on. I know that when I visited a primary school once to teach an English lesson I spotted a rack of about 40 identical unicycles in one of the halls. That’s more unicycles than I’ve ever seen in one place before. That is more unicycles than really should ever be in one place. It looks deeply, deeply wrong, like stepping into a parallel universe that never invented the bike.
And they actually ride them for transport too. We’ve all seen circus performers prat about on the really tall ones, leaning backwards and making the wheel slide forwards and then doing the opposite. Japanese kids don’t do that. Instead they zoom past me like a tiny cheetah on their way to the combini (convenience store). It’s a truly mystifying sight; scores of children zipping about like mosquitoes, eating ice cream with their free hands and suddenly at adult height, despite being 5.
And the main thought it prompts is, why? Why unicycles? They ride bikes too, bikes are sensible, they get you places faster and you don’t fall off. Is space at such a premium in Japan that they can’t store a second wheel?
3. Okonimyaki
I’ve mentioned my deep and abiding love for ramen a coupler of times on this site and I stand by my position. Ramen is some kind of magic food that, despite being nobody’s absolute favourite meal, everyone in the world could happily eat every single day. Anyone who claims otherwise is just being contrary for the sake of it. What I haven’t mentioned much is another Japanese concoction that gives me a deep and satisfying pleasure, okonomiyaki.
The name comes from “okonomi2 meaning “what you want” and “yaki” a ubiquitous Japanese word that is typically translated to mean fry.
It doesn’t really, it just means cooked. Take takoyaki for example, the name implies that you’d be eating some kind of fried octopus. what it actually is, is a dumpling with a piece of octopus inside.
Anyway, okonomiyaki means “what you like fried” and as the name implies it’s a sort of bring everything you have left over and cook it up kind of meal. It’s sort of like a cross between a pizza and an omelette. The chef prepares a sort of omelette batter with flour and shredded cabbage. He frys this and then adds whatever toppings you asked for, usually in my case cheese, bacon and mochi (rice cake) because I am trying to toughen up my arteries with endurance training.
There are a million ways to cook and serve it and many famous variations (such as Hiroshima-yaki which features thin soba noodles and is prepared in layers) but the way most common in Kansai, where I live, is for the chef to mix up and prepare the batter, cook it, add the toppings and then bring it out to a hot plate where you are seated. The okonimyaki continues to cook on the hotplate whilst you add okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, seaweed, katsuobushi (tuna flakes), chilli powder and any other toppings that come to mind. Then you set about slicing it up, transfer a piece to a plate, eat it and then repeat.
As I understand it in most areas outside of Kansai you have to mix up and cook your own batter in the restaurant. Sod that, if I’m going to pay for the privilege of cooking my own dinner it better by all you can eat and it better be principally meat.
Okonomiyaki originates from the tail end of World War 2 (or the Pacific War as it is known here) when the rice harvest, already depleted because of all the young drafted men, was largely used for military purposes and much food was rationed. Deprived of their main staple food Japanese people in Osaka and the surrounding area started making pancakes with what they did have (eggs, cabbage and flour) and then covering it in anything that had a bit more flavour than cabbage and eggs. In fact enterprising women who had lost family in the war used to sell the basic pancake at the roadside cheap for labourers to buy for lunch.
The last time I went to eat okonomiyaki something rather odd happened to me. My girlfriend and I were enjoying a heart cloggingly thick and delicious okonomiyaki in our local restaurant. The only other people in there was a man in his 30’s or 40’s and this man’s daughter. They finished up their dinner and the daughter left and this man came up over and awkwardly tried to start a conversation with Fran and I. So far so normal, one of the negatives of being a foreigner in Japan is that occasionally very weird people will come up and try to talk to you. We politely answered his questions as to where we were from and then let the conversation drop so we could get back to our dinner.
When it came time to pay the waiter tried to charge us for the man and his daughter’s meal.
……
I was immediately very, very annoyed.
According to the waiter the man had said that we had agreed to pay for his dinner tonight since he didn’t have any cash on him. He would then come back and pay for the dinner the next day and then we could get our money back from the restaurant.
No, we said, we agreed to do no such thing.
Oh really, it’s just that Japanese people do this kind of thing all the time and we would eventually get our money back and…..
No.
Please.
If you carry on like this then we’re going to walk out of here without paying for either meal.
Eventually, after much cajoling from Fran and much angry glowering from me the waiter relented. I do feel kind of sorry for the waiter. He is obviously a really trusting and nice guy to believe the man and I do hope the man came back the next and paid for dinner. I highly doubt it though, and the waiter probably had the cost of two people’s dinner coming out of his paycheck. However sorry as I felt for him what an idiot. At the very least when he got this story from the man he could have asked us if that was okay. We’d have said no and then he’d have been able to get the money from the odd man.
4. Fruit
The fruit in Japan is incredible.
I don’t know how much the difference would apply to a South African, an American or an Aussie but in comparison with British fruit Japanese fruit is the nectar of the gods. It’s so much juicier, tastier, fresher and more refreshing.
I got my first taste of how bloody amazing Japanese fruit is on my first morning in Japan. The JET programme had arranged for new arrivals to stay in a very up market hotel in Tokyo. The breakfast the next morning was an entirely free buffet. I grabbed myself a cooked breakfast and, spying some pineapple, I added that to a plate as a dessert. Pineapple is my favourite fruit in the entire world. Much like ramen I am incapable of turning down the offer of pineapple. This also extends to pineapple flavoured things like sweets and drinks. I love it unconditionally* and so I was pleased to get some for free.
Words cannot describe the taste epiphany that occurred to me that day. It was a road to Damascus moment, well, road to Del Monte anyway, for I never realized fruit could taste so good.
For the next couple of days I gorged myself on the pineapple and melon marveling that I could live 21 years and never eat a melon this nice. However there was a melancholy edge to my gluttony, for I had sadly assumed that the fruit was this good because the hotel was very expensive and must order pineapple of a particularly high quality.
Happily I was wrong, fruit here is uniformly better than back home.
This is because, generally, it isn’t transported when it is waiting to ripen, and if it is it travels a much shorter distance than fruit to Britain. There are fruits here that are roughly the same or inferior to the equivalent in Britain, strawberries, oranges, lemons and limes; but they are completely unimportant to me compared to how good the melons, grapefruits and pineapples are.
*this is entirely untrue because there are two conditions of my love for pineapples. Firstly I have to be able to afford it and secondly I know that I can only eat a limited amount of it before my tongue becomes an agonising monstrosity for the rest of the day.
5. Arcades
I like computer games but I am not a computer/video games nerd/geek.
Allow me to clarify that.
I have zero issue with the label “geek” nor do I have any issues with using it as a term to describe myself. I’m just realistically stating a fact that compared to most of the people who have an interest in computer games I barely qualify as even a minor enthusiast. So when I say I like computer games I don’t really think I like then much more than your average British bloke of my age.
There is an exception to this rule though; I have a particular fondness for old games as most new computer games leave me completely flat. First person shooters do nothing for me, nor do modern adventure games (which feel more like poorly written stories than games), racing games are more simulations than games as is nearly every sports game ever produced and don’t get me started on the state of modern platformers. What I like are computer games that first and foremost are GAMES! That realise that setting out to simulate reality is a folly for an electronic medium and instead embrace their abstract nature and focus upon the experience they offer being first and foremost, fun.
It appears that the vast majority of console owners in Britain and America disagree with me. However in Japan the situation is very different. Here games are still principally about silly and abstract fun, normally with an Italian plumber in a land of mushrooms.
Moreover Japan has a similar love affair with “retro” gaming. There are shops in any of the major Japanese cities selling older consoles and vast collections of older games. It is the easiest country in the world to get a SNES and 10 or 20 games, probably for less than 20 pounds and happily entertain yourself for the next 4 or 5 years! If, like me, you are bloody terrible at computer games anyway.
And Japan never fell out of love with that most visible symbol of the older gaming culture, arcades. I can’t speak for America but I know that in Britain computer game arcades don’t really exist anymore. So called “Amusements” still proliferate at the sea side but these are mostly filled with shove ha’penny machines, slots, fruit machines and other cheap gambling diversions. Actual games, where the only goal is to have fun, are few and far between.
Not so in my adopted land. In Sannomiya alone I can think of about 10 gaming arcades most of which are quite close to each other. These still have a lot floor space given over to gambling machines (pachinko, horse racing, etc) and a vast swathe of space given over to crane machines but they make up for it by having a lot of actual honest to god games too.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, Adam, there’s a reason gaming arcades are a thing of that past. It’s because arcades were only popular because cabinets were vastly more powerful machines than home consoles so to play a good computer game you needed to go to an arcade. Nowadays consoles can equal and generally exceed the power of cabinets so why pay all that money for something you can get at home?
Well for several reasons my friends, several reasons.
Firstly, arcades just appeal to me. There is something about them that is relatively unique, the notion of a space given over to nothing more than having fun. They’re playgrounds for adults basically, a space where the only possible thing to do is enjoy yourself or leave. This is why I like the gambling style places much less. They have a sort of goal (make money) whereas arcades have no purpose other than to have fun.
Secondly, although arcade cabinets can’t compete with home consoles on a power basis anymore they can compete on the design of the cabinet and how you play the game. You can play racing games with actual steering wheels and chairs, music games with replica instruments (admittedly you can do this at home but it’ll cost you and how likely are you to buy a replica shamisen, taiko drum or drum kit?), surfing games on surfboards, rowing games on row boats, horse riding games on imitation horses! I don’t care how advanced consoles get you are never going to be pretending to ride a horse in the comfort of your home in any sort of console game.
Hell, there’s even one relatively popular game that simulates riding in the cockpit of a gundam.
Thirdly arcades are great for filling in a few minutes of time. Consoles are obviously the better place to play a long form story led RPG or to have some mates round and spend an entire evening trying to best each other at Mario kart. However arcades can fill in those 5 or 10 minutes when you’re waiting for a friend to meet you, or a film to start at the cinema, or for the beer garden to open. Just having them around makes getting through a normal course of evening’s events much more varied and interesting.
So now that I’ve rabbited on about how much I like them for long enough what are my favourite games to play?
Well I’ll start with my least favourite, the arcade version of Mario Kart. Despite Mario Kart being generally one of my favourite computer games ever (and Mario Kart Double Dash being basically how I spent University) I despise the Arcade version. This is partly because the game was farmed out to Namco from Nintendo and the level and weapon design is vastly inferior to what I’ve come to expect from this series but it is mostly because my girlfriend always beats me. Always! It is deeply annoying.
(I got this off the internet so i have no idea who this bloke is)
My favourite is easily the “taiko drumming game”. Taiko is a traditional form of Japanese drumming that I have mentioned on this sight before. Basically you have a single large drum placed on it’s side and 2 thick wooden sticks. Rythms are beat out on the drum itself and on the sides of the drum. In the game you beat out a rhythm to popular J–pop songs, anime theme tunes and computer game themes. There is little in this life more purely joyful than trying to play the theme to “Super Mario Bros” on a plastic replica of an ancient Japanese instrument.
6. Toilets
We all know about the Japanese technologically advanced toilets that clean your arse, play soothing music and even automatically lift the lid up if you’re approaching. These contraptions are ridiculous in every possible way and are rightly ridiculed. As well as being the ultimate symbol of the amount of conspicuous consumption in this country they are absolutely horrible for the environment.
There are however, three toilet innovations that I am prepared to give a pass to.
1. My own toilet, observe.
See that little sink there, when I flush the toilet the water from the pipe passes through the tap and into the sink before it drains into the bowl. This means that I use less water washing my hands because I don’t have to go to the sink to do so.
This would be a rare example of a Japanese toilet helping the environment. However it would be a very good example of the Japanese approach to design.
Design in this country is king. There is an insane amount of thought gone into how to improve every single aspect of every object you own and sue in daily life. Design is so worshipped here that people collect tiny replica miniatures of famous chair designs.
I’ll say that again. Entirely sane people collect tiny replicas of FAMOUS DESIGNER CHAIRS!
Yet, oddly, this makes not a lick of difference to the average person because Japanese people are so very keen on tradition. The cooking utensils, rooms, ways of cleaning and to a certain extent the clothes have not changed significantly in Japan for hundreds of years. Japanese people love a “right” way to do things and despite really liking good design they very rarely later anything traditionally Japanese. Case in point many places still use the squatting hole in the ground traditional Japanese toilet.
Yet, when you introduce something new to Japan, something we in the west have taken for granted for some time, they immediately take a good long hard look at it and re-design it so it is much more efficient and useful. My toilet is a good case in point. An incredibly simple innovation that saves the environment and which will never be adopted in Britain because we don’t care about good design.
2. The fluttering bird thing.
This gets a pass because it makes me giggle for a very specific reason.
It seems that Japanese women in public restrooms don’t like other people in the restroom to hear them, um, using it. Research discovered that a lot of women repeatedly flushed the toilet in order to hide the sound of them, um, yeah. This was obviously a very wasteful and inconvenient thing to do so some bright spark invented this.
It’s a little box that when an arm is waved in front of it makes a noise like bird song. Effectively hiding the sound of the, um.
The very specific reason that this makes me giggle is that I have a female friend (who shall remain nameless) who once explained to me that even in a cubicle she can’t pee if anyone else is in the toilet because she is so mortified that they might hear her. I found out about these boxes on Japan Probe and immediately cracked up thinking about what my friend’s reaction to these would be.
3. The toilet at my school.
It has a heated seat.
A heated seat.
For my arse, in winter, when it is cold. A heated seat.
I know this is terribly wasteful but it isn’t my toilet and it’s not like I’m going to convince Kocho sensei to install a new one. Besides do you have any idea how nice a heated toilet seat is? That my friends is true luxury.
BTW whilst I was looking for pictures of Pacman I found this.
How awesome is that?!
1. The Wildlife
This is one of those things I love about Japan that came as a complete surprise to me. You probably know that the southern coast of Japan is basically one huge metropolis. From Tokyo down to Hiroshima it’s all city, with no real gaps in between.
However while Japan is famous for it’s metropolises it’s easy to lose sight of why it is so densely urbanised. There is very little space where people can live and build and nearly all of it has already been re-claimed. This leaves an awful lot of space that is simply left over to nature. It’s easy to forget this when you’re surrounded on all sides by grey concrete stretching up to block the sun but it takes about an hour’s walk for me to get from my flat in a built up town and major transport link to a forest up a mountain.
Because of this there is a lot of large native wildlife in Japan. Far more than what I am used to in Britain. I have seen more large birds of prey in the year I have lived here than I have ever seen in my entire life before. I sit by a pond filled with turtles, everyday when I wait for the bus (which is also where I twice saw a snake), there are far more butterflies here than Britain, there are fearless little sparrows that bother you whenever you sit down and there are entrancing dragonflies and deeply irritating cicadas.
In fact let’s not get started on the bugs because if I do this quickly won’t be a “things I like about Japan” entry. Suffice it to say the butterflies and dragonflies are lovely and leave it there.
And these aren’t just limited to the forests but are a day to day part of life. However what does live in the forest are some truly amazing animals, wild boars, poisonous snakes, tanuki (sort of raccoon dogs) and bears. Bears! I never knew Japan had bears.
Mario here, dressed as a tanuki.
Living in Britain it is easy to forget about the natural world as bar trees and pigeons it hardly ever intrudes upon the everyday of life. British people may decry me for this because Britain ahs some of the greenest cities of any developed country. However the point is not so much the flowers and the grass but the animals. There aren’t really any animals jostling for space with people in Britain, bar birds, domesticated animals and bugs. Here exotic and interesting animals are something I see everyday and they're one of the things I will miss most when I leave Japan.
2. Unicycles
Yes, unicycles. Yes, the bikes with only one wheel.
For whatever reason (and frankly I couldn’t even begin to guess why) unicycles are massively more popular in Japan than they are in pretty much every other country in the world.
Primary school kids in Japan are taught how to ride unicycles. In fact I think some schools have unicycles that the students can practice on. I know that when I visited a primary school once to teach an English lesson I spotted a rack of about 40 identical unicycles in one of the halls. That’s more unicycles than I’ve ever seen in one place before. That is more unicycles than really should ever be in one place. It looks deeply, deeply wrong, like stepping into a parallel universe that never invented the bike.
And they actually ride them for transport too. We’ve all seen circus performers prat about on the really tall ones, leaning backwards and making the wheel slide forwards and then doing the opposite. Japanese kids don’t do that. Instead they zoom past me like a tiny cheetah on their way to the combini (convenience store). It’s a truly mystifying sight; scores of children zipping about like mosquitoes, eating ice cream with their free hands and suddenly at adult height, despite being 5.
And the main thought it prompts is, why? Why unicycles? They ride bikes too, bikes are sensible, they get you places faster and you don’t fall off. Is space at such a premium in Japan that they can’t store a second wheel?
3. Okonimyaki
I’ve mentioned my deep and abiding love for ramen a coupler of times on this site and I stand by my position. Ramen is some kind of magic food that, despite being nobody’s absolute favourite meal, everyone in the world could happily eat every single day. Anyone who claims otherwise is just being contrary for the sake of it. What I haven’t mentioned much is another Japanese concoction that gives me a deep and satisfying pleasure, okonomiyaki.
The name comes from “okonomi2 meaning “what you want” and “yaki” a ubiquitous Japanese word that is typically translated to mean fry.
It doesn’t really, it just means cooked. Take takoyaki for example, the name implies that you’d be eating some kind of fried octopus. what it actually is, is a dumpling with a piece of octopus inside.
Anyway, okonomiyaki means “what you like fried” and as the name implies it’s a sort of bring everything you have left over and cook it up kind of meal. It’s sort of like a cross between a pizza and an omelette. The chef prepares a sort of omelette batter with flour and shredded cabbage. He frys this and then adds whatever toppings you asked for, usually in my case cheese, bacon and mochi (rice cake) because I am trying to toughen up my arteries with endurance training.
There are a million ways to cook and serve it and many famous variations (such as Hiroshima-yaki which features thin soba noodles and is prepared in layers) but the way most common in Kansai, where I live, is for the chef to mix up and prepare the batter, cook it, add the toppings and then bring it out to a hot plate where you are seated. The okonimyaki continues to cook on the hotplate whilst you add okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, seaweed, katsuobushi (tuna flakes), chilli powder and any other toppings that come to mind. Then you set about slicing it up, transfer a piece to a plate, eat it and then repeat.
As I understand it in most areas outside of Kansai you have to mix up and cook your own batter in the restaurant. Sod that, if I’m going to pay for the privilege of cooking my own dinner it better by all you can eat and it better be principally meat.
Okonomiyaki originates from the tail end of World War 2 (or the Pacific War as it is known here) when the rice harvest, already depleted because of all the young drafted men, was largely used for military purposes and much food was rationed. Deprived of their main staple food Japanese people in Osaka and the surrounding area started making pancakes with what they did have (eggs, cabbage and flour) and then covering it in anything that had a bit more flavour than cabbage and eggs. In fact enterprising women who had lost family in the war used to sell the basic pancake at the roadside cheap for labourers to buy for lunch.
The last time I went to eat okonomiyaki something rather odd happened to me. My girlfriend and I were enjoying a heart cloggingly thick and delicious okonomiyaki in our local restaurant. The only other people in there was a man in his 30’s or 40’s and this man’s daughter. They finished up their dinner and the daughter left and this man came up over and awkwardly tried to start a conversation with Fran and I. So far so normal, one of the negatives of being a foreigner in Japan is that occasionally very weird people will come up and try to talk to you. We politely answered his questions as to where we were from and then let the conversation drop so we could get back to our dinner.
When it came time to pay the waiter tried to charge us for the man and his daughter’s meal.
……
I was immediately very, very annoyed.
According to the waiter the man had said that we had agreed to pay for his dinner tonight since he didn’t have any cash on him. He would then come back and pay for the dinner the next day and then we could get our money back from the restaurant.
No, we said, we agreed to do no such thing.
Oh really, it’s just that Japanese people do this kind of thing all the time and we would eventually get our money back and…..
No.
Please.
If you carry on like this then we’re going to walk out of here without paying for either meal.
Eventually, after much cajoling from Fran and much angry glowering from me the waiter relented. I do feel kind of sorry for the waiter. He is obviously a really trusting and nice guy to believe the man and I do hope the man came back the next and paid for dinner. I highly doubt it though, and the waiter probably had the cost of two people’s dinner coming out of his paycheck. However sorry as I felt for him what an idiot. At the very least when he got this story from the man he could have asked us if that was okay. We’d have said no and then he’d have been able to get the money from the odd man.
4. Fruit
The fruit in Japan is incredible.
I don’t know how much the difference would apply to a South African, an American or an Aussie but in comparison with British fruit Japanese fruit is the nectar of the gods. It’s so much juicier, tastier, fresher and more refreshing.
I got my first taste of how bloody amazing Japanese fruit is on my first morning in Japan. The JET programme had arranged for new arrivals to stay in a very up market hotel in Tokyo. The breakfast the next morning was an entirely free buffet. I grabbed myself a cooked breakfast and, spying some pineapple, I added that to a plate as a dessert. Pineapple is my favourite fruit in the entire world. Much like ramen I am incapable of turning down the offer of pineapple. This also extends to pineapple flavoured things like sweets and drinks. I love it unconditionally* and so I was pleased to get some for free.
Words cannot describe the taste epiphany that occurred to me that day. It was a road to Damascus moment, well, road to Del Monte anyway, for I never realized fruit could taste so good.
For the next couple of days I gorged myself on the pineapple and melon marveling that I could live 21 years and never eat a melon this nice. However there was a melancholy edge to my gluttony, for I had sadly assumed that the fruit was this good because the hotel was very expensive and must order pineapple of a particularly high quality.
Happily I was wrong, fruit here is uniformly better than back home.
This is because, generally, it isn’t transported when it is waiting to ripen, and if it is it travels a much shorter distance than fruit to Britain. There are fruits here that are roughly the same or inferior to the equivalent in Britain, strawberries, oranges, lemons and limes; but they are completely unimportant to me compared to how good the melons, grapefruits and pineapples are.
*this is entirely untrue because there are two conditions of my love for pineapples. Firstly I have to be able to afford it and secondly I know that I can only eat a limited amount of it before my tongue becomes an agonising monstrosity for the rest of the day.
5. Arcades
I like computer games but I am not a computer/video games nerd/geek.
Allow me to clarify that.
I have zero issue with the label “geek” nor do I have any issues with using it as a term to describe myself. I’m just realistically stating a fact that compared to most of the people who have an interest in computer games I barely qualify as even a minor enthusiast. So when I say I like computer games I don’t really think I like then much more than your average British bloke of my age.
There is an exception to this rule though; I have a particular fondness for old games as most new computer games leave me completely flat. First person shooters do nothing for me, nor do modern adventure games (which feel more like poorly written stories than games), racing games are more simulations than games as is nearly every sports game ever produced and don’t get me started on the state of modern platformers. What I like are computer games that first and foremost are GAMES! That realise that setting out to simulate reality is a folly for an electronic medium and instead embrace their abstract nature and focus upon the experience they offer being first and foremost, fun.
It appears that the vast majority of console owners in Britain and America disagree with me. However in Japan the situation is very different. Here games are still principally about silly and abstract fun, normally with an Italian plumber in a land of mushrooms.
Moreover Japan has a similar love affair with “retro” gaming. There are shops in any of the major Japanese cities selling older consoles and vast collections of older games. It is the easiest country in the world to get a SNES and 10 or 20 games, probably for less than 20 pounds and happily entertain yourself for the next 4 or 5 years! If, like me, you are bloody terrible at computer games anyway.
And Japan never fell out of love with that most visible symbol of the older gaming culture, arcades. I can’t speak for America but I know that in Britain computer game arcades don’t really exist anymore. So called “Amusements” still proliferate at the sea side but these are mostly filled with shove ha’penny machines, slots, fruit machines and other cheap gambling diversions. Actual games, where the only goal is to have fun, are few and far between.
Not so in my adopted land. In Sannomiya alone I can think of about 10 gaming arcades most of which are quite close to each other. These still have a lot floor space given over to gambling machines (pachinko, horse racing, etc) and a vast swathe of space given over to crane machines but they make up for it by having a lot of actual honest to god games too.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, Adam, there’s a reason gaming arcades are a thing of that past. It’s because arcades were only popular because cabinets were vastly more powerful machines than home consoles so to play a good computer game you needed to go to an arcade. Nowadays consoles can equal and generally exceed the power of cabinets so why pay all that money for something you can get at home?
Well for several reasons my friends, several reasons.
Firstly, arcades just appeal to me. There is something about them that is relatively unique, the notion of a space given over to nothing more than having fun. They’re playgrounds for adults basically, a space where the only possible thing to do is enjoy yourself or leave. This is why I like the gambling style places much less. They have a sort of goal (make money) whereas arcades have no purpose other than to have fun.
Secondly, although arcade cabinets can’t compete with home consoles on a power basis anymore they can compete on the design of the cabinet and how you play the game. You can play racing games with actual steering wheels and chairs, music games with replica instruments (admittedly you can do this at home but it’ll cost you and how likely are you to buy a replica shamisen, taiko drum or drum kit?), surfing games on surfboards, rowing games on row boats, horse riding games on imitation horses! I don’t care how advanced consoles get you are never going to be pretending to ride a horse in the comfort of your home in any sort of console game.
Hell, there’s even one relatively popular game that simulates riding in the cockpit of a gundam.
Thirdly arcades are great for filling in a few minutes of time. Consoles are obviously the better place to play a long form story led RPG or to have some mates round and spend an entire evening trying to best each other at Mario kart. However arcades can fill in those 5 or 10 minutes when you’re waiting for a friend to meet you, or a film to start at the cinema, or for the beer garden to open. Just having them around makes getting through a normal course of evening’s events much more varied and interesting.
So now that I’ve rabbited on about how much I like them for long enough what are my favourite games to play?
Well I’ll start with my least favourite, the arcade version of Mario Kart. Despite Mario Kart being generally one of my favourite computer games ever (and Mario Kart Double Dash being basically how I spent University) I despise the Arcade version. This is partly because the game was farmed out to Namco from Nintendo and the level and weapon design is vastly inferior to what I’ve come to expect from this series but it is mostly because my girlfriend always beats me. Always! It is deeply annoying.
(I got this off the internet so i have no idea who this bloke is)
My favourite is easily the “taiko drumming game”. Taiko is a traditional form of Japanese drumming that I have mentioned on this sight before. Basically you have a single large drum placed on it’s side and 2 thick wooden sticks. Rythms are beat out on the drum itself and on the sides of the drum. In the game you beat out a rhythm to popular J–pop songs, anime theme tunes and computer game themes. There is little in this life more purely joyful than trying to play the theme to “Super Mario Bros” on a plastic replica of an ancient Japanese instrument.
6. Toilets
We all know about the Japanese technologically advanced toilets that clean your arse, play soothing music and even automatically lift the lid up if you’re approaching. These contraptions are ridiculous in every possible way and are rightly ridiculed. As well as being the ultimate symbol of the amount of conspicuous consumption in this country they are absolutely horrible for the environment.
There are however, three toilet innovations that I am prepared to give a pass to.
1. My own toilet, observe.
See that little sink there, when I flush the toilet the water from the pipe passes through the tap and into the sink before it drains into the bowl. This means that I use less water washing my hands because I don’t have to go to the sink to do so.
This would be a rare example of a Japanese toilet helping the environment. However it would be a very good example of the Japanese approach to design.
Design in this country is king. There is an insane amount of thought gone into how to improve every single aspect of every object you own and sue in daily life. Design is so worshipped here that people collect tiny replica miniatures of famous chair designs.
I’ll say that again. Entirely sane people collect tiny replicas of FAMOUS DESIGNER CHAIRS!
Yet, oddly, this makes not a lick of difference to the average person because Japanese people are so very keen on tradition. The cooking utensils, rooms, ways of cleaning and to a certain extent the clothes have not changed significantly in Japan for hundreds of years. Japanese people love a “right” way to do things and despite really liking good design they very rarely later anything traditionally Japanese. Case in point many places still use the squatting hole in the ground traditional Japanese toilet.
Yet, when you introduce something new to Japan, something we in the west have taken for granted for some time, they immediately take a good long hard look at it and re-design it so it is much more efficient and useful. My toilet is a good case in point. An incredibly simple innovation that saves the environment and which will never be adopted in Britain because we don’t care about good design.
2. The fluttering bird thing.
This gets a pass because it makes me giggle for a very specific reason.
It seems that Japanese women in public restrooms don’t like other people in the restroom to hear them, um, using it. Research discovered that a lot of women repeatedly flushed the toilet in order to hide the sound of them, um, yeah. This was obviously a very wasteful and inconvenient thing to do so some bright spark invented this.
It’s a little box that when an arm is waved in front of it makes a noise like bird song. Effectively hiding the sound of the, um.
The very specific reason that this makes me giggle is that I have a female friend (who shall remain nameless) who once explained to me that even in a cubicle she can’t pee if anyone else is in the toilet because she is so mortified that they might hear her. I found out about these boxes on Japan Probe and immediately cracked up thinking about what my friend’s reaction to these would be.
3. The toilet at my school.
It has a heated seat.
A heated seat.
For my arse, in winter, when it is cold. A heated seat.
I know this is terribly wasteful but it isn’t my toilet and it’s not like I’m going to convince Kocho sensei to install a new one. Besides do you have any idea how nice a heated toilet seat is? That my friends is true luxury.
BTW whilst I was looking for pictures of Pacman I found this.
How awesome is that?!
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Wherein I Affectionately Mock My Student's Work
I put together a simply enormous post today at work. Unfortunately because I am an idiot I have left it at work. I shall probably post it tomorrow thought to make up for the missed post on Tuesday.
Until then here's some work my students did recently.
The grammar point my san-nensei have been working on recently is passive sentence construction. The exercise they have been doing is to create their own countries and then tell me what food is eaten in that country, what drinks are drunks, clothes are worn, etc, etc. They can do anything they like but I gave them a hint sheet with some normal and some very odd answers.
Some of the answers were fantastic. For example, most of the boys said that curry was eaten in their country and beer was drunk in their country, a combination that made me feel so much at home. Oddly nearly every single girl opted for orange juice, what they have against tea, beer and wine I don&t know.
But best of all are some of the names for countries they came up with.
Here's a short list.
Ringo-land - No word on whether that's the Beatle or the Japanese word for apple.
Dream-land - Not very funny but I did a count and nearly 18 different kids opted
for Dream-land. I can only assume there is some anime or computer
game with a Dream-land in it.
Never-land - Similarly I lost track of all the Never-lands that I got.
Lucky-land - That's Ireland, surely?
EVA-land - Where dragons are seen apparently, and not angels as one might
expect*
A land - Pragmatical at least.
Star-land - Hollywood right.
Stars-land - Ah, but somebody else went one better.
BIOHAZARD-land - BIOHAZARD is the Japanese game for the computer game we know as
Resident Evil in the U.K. and the States. Although I remember the
first one coming out when I was there age it's still incredibly
popular with my kids. In BIOHAZARD-land Humans are eaten, blood is
drunk, suits are worn, Umbrella events will be held (the villains
in the Resident Evil games are called the Umbrella cooperation),
zombles (bless) are seen and oddly the Olympics were held.
As if BIOHAZARD-land weren't disturbing enough, two different kids
in two separate classes came up with the idea.
Free-land - Where workers control the means of production!
Cat-land - Where people eat dogs.
Special Beautiful Island - Which is extra specially beautiful because we all dress
like pirates.
Beautiful-land - Sure it's beautiful, but it isn't special beautiful is it.
Atari-land - Finally, a country where I can be free to enjoy classic 80's
gaming.
Smile-land - I don't think I'd fit in there.
Future-land - Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!
Disney-land
Disney-sea
Disney-rina - They're taking over the world!
Silent Hill - Apparently kangaroos are seen in Silent Hill. Now I don't remember
any kangaroos but I do know about the evil nurses.
Scary-land - Sure they eat humans there and drink blood but how scary can it be
without evil nurses.
Tea-land - This sounds like my kind of place.
Japon - Bad spelling or deliberate humour, how would you mark it?
Peace-land - Peace-land apparently has dinosaurs and wrestling. I propose it's
name be changed to awesome ruckus world.
Interesting-land - Ironically this sheet was otherwise very boring.
Ultra-land - Well that's what I interpreted it as. The kid actually wrote Uruta-
land, which I initially read as Urethra-land because I have a sick,
sick mind.
and finally.
THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
STEAK IS EATEN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
BEER IS DRUNK IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
LEATHER JACKETS AND LEATHER PANTS ARE WORN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
TANKS ARE SEEN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
THE WARS WERE HELD IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
THE VERY BIG WARDS WILL BE HELD IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
I have no idea what game or tv show the front of armament is from but there is no way the kid made it up on his own. He actually wrote it like that as well, all in caps with no punctuation. Of course I had to mark him down for that but I really, really didn't want to because THE VERY BIG WARS made me piss myself.
You want some more, okay how about this.
This is Edo Harumi. Edo Harumi is a Japanese comedian. Like all Japanese comedians she doesn't so much tell jokes or make observations as do vaguely humorous routines with a sort of catchphrase gimmick. In her case she sticks out her thumb and says goo like a baby. This actually means "good." Basically her whole routine is based around taking the piss out of English language teachers and the use of the English language in Japan. A lot of her mannerisms are based aroudn Japanese teachers of English, and you can take it fron me she's spot on. Her other big joke is to take an -ing word in English and turn it into -ingoo i.e. hop, step, jumpingoo. This is a reference to how Japanese people speak English. See the Japanese language is entirely phonetic and all it's letters (except n) can only be pronounced with an associated vowel sound. So in Japan there is a separate letter for ga, ge, gu, gi and go. If faced with an English word that ends in a consonant the natural thing to do is to turn it into a phenom they're comfortable with, hence nearly all my students call me Adamu because they struggle to say Adam.
Yeah I know, not exactly side splitting stuff but she is one of the few Japanese comedians that actually does make me laugh and I figured I'd post some Japanese humour I appreciate for a change. That and her song to the tune of "My Sherona" is one of the catchiest things I have ever heard and I no longer want to suffer alone.
Still not enough.
Okay, how about human tetris.
Alright not quite human tetris, but still bloody amazing.
Still not enough?
How about the finest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
Well that should satiate you until tomorrow. However despite the fact that it has nothing to do with Japan or this blog I still want to post this video because it makes me giggle outrageously.
Until then here's some work my students did recently.
The grammar point my san-nensei have been working on recently is passive sentence construction. The exercise they have been doing is to create their own countries and then tell me what food is eaten in that country, what drinks are drunks, clothes are worn, etc, etc. They can do anything they like but I gave them a hint sheet with some normal and some very odd answers.
Some of the answers were fantastic. For example, most of the boys said that curry was eaten in their country and beer was drunk in their country, a combination that made me feel so much at home. Oddly nearly every single girl opted for orange juice, what they have against tea, beer and wine I don&t know.
But best of all are some of the names for countries they came up with.
Here's a short list.
Ringo-land - No word on whether that's the Beatle or the Japanese word for apple.
Dream-land - Not very funny but I did a count and nearly 18 different kids opted
for Dream-land. I can only assume there is some anime or computer
game with a Dream-land in it.
Never-land - Similarly I lost track of all the Never-lands that I got.
Lucky-land - That's Ireland, surely?
EVA-land - Where dragons are seen apparently, and not angels as one might
expect*
A land - Pragmatical at least.
Star-land - Hollywood right.
Stars-land - Ah, but somebody else went one better.
BIOHAZARD-land - BIOHAZARD is the Japanese game for the computer game we know as
Resident Evil in the U.K. and the States. Although I remember the
first one coming out when I was there age it's still incredibly
popular with my kids. In BIOHAZARD-land Humans are eaten, blood is
drunk, suits are worn, Umbrella events will be held (the villains
in the Resident Evil games are called the Umbrella cooperation),
zombles (bless) are seen and oddly the Olympics were held.
As if BIOHAZARD-land weren't disturbing enough, two different kids
in two separate classes came up with the idea.
Free-land - Where workers control the means of production!
Cat-land - Where people eat dogs.
Special Beautiful Island - Which is extra specially beautiful because we all dress
like pirates.
Beautiful-land - Sure it's beautiful, but it isn't special beautiful is it.
Atari-land - Finally, a country where I can be free to enjoy classic 80's
gaming.
Smile-land - I don't think I'd fit in there.
Future-land - Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!
Disney-land
Disney-sea
Disney-rina - They're taking over the world!
Silent Hill - Apparently kangaroos are seen in Silent Hill. Now I don't remember
any kangaroos but I do know about the evil nurses.
Scary-land - Sure they eat humans there and drink blood but how scary can it be
without evil nurses.
Tea-land - This sounds like my kind of place.
Japon - Bad spelling or deliberate humour, how would you mark it?
Peace-land - Peace-land apparently has dinosaurs and wrestling. I propose it's
name be changed to awesome ruckus world.
Interesting-land - Ironically this sheet was otherwise very boring.
Ultra-land - Well that's what I interpreted it as. The kid actually wrote Uruta-
land, which I initially read as Urethra-land because I have a sick,
sick mind.
and finally.
THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
STEAK IS EATEN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
BEER IS DRUNK IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
LEATHER JACKETS AND LEATHER PANTS ARE WORN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
TANKS ARE SEEN IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
THE WARS WERE HELD IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
THE VERY BIG WARDS WILL BE HELD IN THE FRONT OF ARMAMENT
I have no idea what game or tv show the front of armament is from but there is no way the kid made it up on his own. He actually wrote it like that as well, all in caps with no punctuation. Of course I had to mark him down for that but I really, really didn't want to because THE VERY BIG WARS made me piss myself.
You want some more, okay how about this.
This is Edo Harumi. Edo Harumi is a Japanese comedian. Like all Japanese comedians she doesn't so much tell jokes or make observations as do vaguely humorous routines with a sort of catchphrase gimmick. In her case she sticks out her thumb and says goo like a baby. This actually means "good." Basically her whole routine is based around taking the piss out of English language teachers and the use of the English language in Japan. A lot of her mannerisms are based aroudn Japanese teachers of English, and you can take it fron me she's spot on. Her other big joke is to take an -ing word in English and turn it into -ingoo i.e. hop, step, jumpingoo. This is a reference to how Japanese people speak English. See the Japanese language is entirely phonetic and all it's letters (except n) can only be pronounced with an associated vowel sound. So in Japan there is a separate letter for ga, ge, gu, gi and go. If faced with an English word that ends in a consonant the natural thing to do is to turn it into a phenom they're comfortable with, hence nearly all my students call me Adamu because they struggle to say Adam.
Yeah I know, not exactly side splitting stuff but she is one of the few Japanese comedians that actually does make me laugh and I figured I'd post some Japanese humour I appreciate for a change. That and her song to the tune of "My Sherona" is one of the catchiest things I have ever heard and I no longer want to suffer alone.
Still not enough.
Okay, how about human tetris.
Alright not quite human tetris, but still bloody amazing.
Still not enough?
How about the finest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
Well that should satiate you until tomorrow. However despite the fact that it has nothing to do with Japan or this blog I still want to post this video because it makes me giggle outrageously.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
There are absolutely no naked men in this post at all.
A very pleasant sign seen in Okayama.
Just a quickie this week as generally nothing particularly interesting has gone so permit me if I may to talk about Den Den town.
Den Den town is an area in Osaka famed for its video games, electronics, manga cafes and generally it’s geek stuff. It is wall to wall robots, games, anime and manga and is generally what I thought all of Japan would be like.
This Saturday myself and Ryan hit up Den Den town and along with all of usual stops hit a few new sites.
The only site I have any photos of though is this amazing retro gaming store that we found. Purely by chance we wandered in and I entered into a kind of nerd nirvana. It was full to the brim with computer games and consoles, quite a few of them older than I am.
The floors of this place were papered with screen shots from old 8 and 32-bit game title screens. In the above pic I recognise Streets of Rage, Sailor Moon, Indiana Jones, R-Type, Lemmings, Mickey and Donald in Dreamland, Gundam, Ultraman, Rampage, Dragonlance, Tetris and Castlevania.
One of the more impressive things in here was a working original Nintendo Famicom. This was only ever released in Japan but was re-tooled to become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Europe and the States. The NES was the first console I ever owned (and it’s still good fun) and here was its big brother for a piddling £20.00!
Pictured here is another Japanese only console, the colossal failure that was the Virtual Boy. Launched in the early 90’s in the height of the VR fad it bombed hard and is the only console Nintendo ever launched that did so in Japan. Part of the problem is that the whole gear you see before you was meant to be worn on the head. And my word is it heavy. A game boy is meant to be portable and lightweight, this needed a specialised stand to be used. The other big problem was that the system reportedly gave people huge and frequent migraines, not a big selling point. Finally the red lines it used to simulate VR were apparently quite hard to see so some of the games were simply unplayable because you spent all your time struggling to see what was happening. Nintendo themselves only ever released one game for the console and then quietly ignored it.
Still, if I wanted one here it was.
2 of the older consoles on offer. No idea about the “snoopy” but the minestorm is actually asteroids (if anyone remembers that game) that could be played at home! Imagine a world where you don’t need to go to an arcade to play videogames!
These appear to be pictures of Mario drawn in a realistic style. No idea whatsoever what is going on or what the context is but I think the spaghetti eating turtle is totemo kawaii! (very cute)
I have no idea what this is either. I just know that he’s been haunting my nightmares ever since.
However, easily the most impressive thing in the entire shop was this little guy. It’s ROB or the Robot Operating Buddy.
ROB is almost single-handedly responsible for computer games still being alive today. In 1983 there was a massive market crash in the states amongst computer games stockists due to Atari’s poor business practises. Stores in the states were not prepared to stock any new computer game consoles as they couldn’t shift the ones they had. In comes Nintendo with a product this is not a computer game, but in fact a newfangled robot toy, with an attached console that was just necessary to make the robot work. The gamble worked and shops in the states were prepared to stock ROB and the attached Nintendo Entertainment System. 2 games later (gyromite and stack ‘em) all support for ROB vanished and Nintendo started doing their real business. Getting families and shops that didn’t know they’d bought one to start buying games for computer consoles.
Poor ROB isn’t remembered much these days but he is a true hero of gaming history.
Other than the gaming store our big visit was to the Gundam shop. This was two floors containing nothing but Gundam related merchandise. Gundam shirts, toys, models, DVD’s, CD’s, games, FOOD! and most notably a giant Gundam hand thrusting through one wall.
Ryan, who approaches a religious fervour in the presence of Gundam, was happy, to say the least. I was searching for a Tequila Gundam but alas none of the ridiculous Gundam from G Gundam were in stock so I left empty handed.
Having sufficiently geeked out we headed to possibly the nerdiest place to eat on the planet. A maid café.
Japan has a big service culture and a service industry that stops at open prostitution but certainly sidles up to it. There are a lot of very, very stressed people in this country and there exist a huge variety of businesses prepared to “relieve” that stress. These range from massage parlours and spas at one end to the hostess bars at the other. Hostess bars are basically places where men come to pay to flirt with women. They go to see their favourite girl, buy her drinks, laugh with her, flirt, sing karaoke, have some dinner and a few drinks and do everything short of actual touching. I guess the closest western equivalent is an escort service except some of these guys form relationships with the hostesses that are closer than with their own wives.
Maid cafes sit comfortably in the middle of this spectrum. They are cafes catering to a very specific fetish, guys who want to see girls dressed as anime-style maids. Honestly the outfits these girls wear are outrageous. Perfectly modest from a sexual standpoint but incredibly cartoony and unreal.
Den Den town is full of Maid Cafes, most of which offer an , ahem, “refresh service” which is wonderfully vague in the details but appears to be along the lines of foot and back massages by girls dressed as cartoon characters. To each his own I guess.
Myself and Ryan were not seeking a “refresh service” (I am more than happily attached) but I didn’t want to come to Japan and pass up on seeing something so patently bizarre and with my girlfriend’s arrival due imminently I thought this might be my last chance. So we searched and searched and eventually found a place just selling food.
It was hilarious! The girls flirt with you outrageously, they called myself and Ryan “master” dropped to floor level to pour drinks and generally rushed round like we were the most important people in the world ever. I think they gave up on us a bit when they twigged that our Japanese isn’t good but they were continuously flirting with the table next to us.
And the food, well the food was pretty good actually. We both ordered a tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet) plate which was huge. The table next to us ordered the “happy time surprise” which turned out to be an omelette and rice (don’t ask) on which the maids drew a little smiley face in ketchup.
I do not think there is another country on earth where grown men pay to have a woman draw a smiley face in ketchup on their food.
No pictures alas, they ban cameras and if you want a picture you have to pay to have one taken with the girls so here are some poached off the internet to give you an idea of what maid cafes are like.
I doubt I’ll be returning but I am glad I went.
Oh and one last thing. Pictured is one of the fabled beer vending machines. However more unusually the bottom row is cans of ramen! Beer and noodles in one machine, what more can a man ask for.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Love Potion Number 9
Okay so maybe not a post every night but still more EXCITING THINGS to come.
Until then I'm going on a massive digression with the first regular Tuesday post and talking about Final Fantasy 7.
Final Fantasy 7 for those not familiar with it is a computer game. You can find out more than you could ever possibly want to know about it here.
However all you really need to know is this. Final Fantasy is not like normal series of computer games, rather than Final Fantasy 7 being a sequel to 6, 5, 4 and eventually just Final Fantasy each new Final Fantasy game is a wholly unique game. It shares some elements with earlier entries in the series but creates its own fantasy world.
FF7 for some reason became massively more popular than any version of the game before or since, to the extent that it's had numerous spin offs and sequels in its own right that aren't technically FF games, its own film (Final Fantasy: Advent Children) and an absolute metric fuckton of merchandising.
The reason this is all pertinent is that this year is the 10th anniversary of the release of FF7. So what says you and I but in Japan to the gaming culture this is a HUGE event. There are new games (FF7: Crisis Core) a new film (Last Order: Final Fantasy 7) re-releases of nearly all the older games, new toys, new merchandise and generally its a big excuse to shift a lot of Final Fantasy 7 crap.
Including my favourite piece of video game merchandise ever.
Look, look it's a "potion" from final Fantasy 7. Potions were just stuff you could buy that replenished health but now YOU CAN DRINK ONE!! Yay! I love this kind of tie-in, stuff plastered with likenesses is one thing but taking a fictional world object and making a real version of it is always fun. So even though I'm not a big FF7 fan (my personal fave is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance) I just had to get this.
The can is pretty nice actually, the print is lovely and clear and the CGI artwork is quite attractive. All in all much classier than a cheap tie-in needed to be.
While I came for the potion most fans will undoubtedly be after the toy included with the can. Now I know full well I'm a grown man and so shouldn't be buying toys, even cool looking ones but honestly, no word of a lie, toys are considered quite cool here. No I'm being quite serious. I know an upmarket women's shoe shop in Sannomiya which proudly displays quite a large set of Ultraman figurines in the window. Toys just don't have the stigma they do in the West as being just for kids(and lets not get started on the porno statuettes). So while I'm not a toy collector I have picked up the odd thing.
So lets see what I got.
AWESOME! Vincent Valentine easily the coolest looking figure in the set. Gotta love the Cerberus statue he's perched on. Plus I love a skinny gunslinger in a tattered red cloak. It worked for Trigun after all.
As for the drink itself. Well it's green, fitting considering the in game potions were green, but never a good sign. It smells alarmingly like the chemical flavour from my childhood known as "bubblegum". A flavour that always annoyed me as a kid because, well bubblegum itself is flavoured. Bubblegum can't be a flavour when it comes in many flavours. That's like having an ice cream flavour or a soup flavour. Nonetheless bubblegum pop was its own flavour. Sort of horribly chemical stuff with a vague sense of fruit but mostly just horrible saccharine sweetener.
So it smells of bubblegum.....how's it taste?
Ah.... of bubblegum.
And now for no reason here's a picture of famous Japanese transvestite Gackt dressed as Vincent Valentine. Enjoy.
Until then I'm going on a massive digression with the first regular Tuesday post and talking about Final Fantasy 7.
Final Fantasy 7 for those not familiar with it is a computer game. You can find out more than you could ever possibly want to know about it here.
However all you really need to know is this. Final Fantasy is not like normal series of computer games, rather than Final Fantasy 7 being a sequel to 6, 5, 4 and eventually just Final Fantasy each new Final Fantasy game is a wholly unique game. It shares some elements with earlier entries in the series but creates its own fantasy world.
FF7 for some reason became massively more popular than any version of the game before or since, to the extent that it's had numerous spin offs and sequels in its own right that aren't technically FF games, its own film (Final Fantasy: Advent Children) and an absolute metric fuckton of merchandising.
The reason this is all pertinent is that this year is the 10th anniversary of the release of FF7. So what says you and I but in Japan to the gaming culture this is a HUGE event. There are new games (FF7: Crisis Core) a new film (Last Order: Final Fantasy 7) re-releases of nearly all the older games, new toys, new merchandise and generally its a big excuse to shift a lot of Final Fantasy 7 crap.
Including my favourite piece of video game merchandise ever.
Look, look it's a "potion" from final Fantasy 7. Potions were just stuff you could buy that replenished health but now YOU CAN DRINK ONE!! Yay! I love this kind of tie-in, stuff plastered with likenesses is one thing but taking a fictional world object and making a real version of it is always fun. So even though I'm not a big FF7 fan (my personal fave is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance) I just had to get this.
The can is pretty nice actually, the print is lovely and clear and the CGI artwork is quite attractive. All in all much classier than a cheap tie-in needed to be.
While I came for the potion most fans will undoubtedly be after the toy included with the can. Now I know full well I'm a grown man and so shouldn't be buying toys, even cool looking ones but honestly, no word of a lie, toys are considered quite cool here. No I'm being quite serious. I know an upmarket women's shoe shop in Sannomiya which proudly displays quite a large set of Ultraman figurines in the window. Toys just don't have the stigma they do in the West as being just for kids(and lets not get started on the porno statuettes). So while I'm not a toy collector I have picked up the odd thing.
So lets see what I got.
AWESOME! Vincent Valentine easily the coolest looking figure in the set. Gotta love the Cerberus statue he's perched on. Plus I love a skinny gunslinger in a tattered red cloak. It worked for Trigun after all.
As for the drink itself. Well it's green, fitting considering the in game potions were green, but never a good sign. It smells alarmingly like the chemical flavour from my childhood known as "bubblegum". A flavour that always annoyed me as a kid because, well bubblegum itself is flavoured. Bubblegum can't be a flavour when it comes in many flavours. That's like having an ice cream flavour or a soup flavour. Nonetheless bubblegum pop was its own flavour. Sort of horribly chemical stuff with a vague sense of fruit but mostly just horrible saccharine sweetener.
So it smells of bubblegum.....how's it taste?
Ah.... of bubblegum.
And now for no reason here's a picture of famous Japanese transvestite Gackt dressed as Vincent Valentine. Enjoy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
