More News NOW!

The latter is like Animal Crossing , only the characters are humans — Nintendo Wii Miis, actually — and thus maybe easier to relate to. It’s business. Her explanation weird despite its terseness: “This is how adults interact in Japan.” Most of the people at the orientation, like me, were under twenty-five. Anime heroes used to be people with amazing job descriptions; now they’re reasonably young men who find themselves miraculously sharing houses with a dozen girls aged six to nine, accidentally almost touching every other scene. What the hell are they doing? The chant soon becomes a scream. We were in a Jeansmate — a Japanese jeans store that is inexplicably open twenty-four hours a day, even in towns where (as in ours) the only god damn supermarket closes at eight in the PM. Good employees like to have fun 3. We were coached in orientation to use a neighbor’s phone to call our own desk phone to learn the exact length of one ring, so that we could practice the timing of picking up the phone partway through its first ring — not soon enough to freak out the person on the other end. Now it’s a niche. They’d be out of work. They called it the “Chocolate Croissant.” What a name! I’m not really sure how this happened, though it got popular. Okay, I’m not going to glorify this. Delicious, garlic-based vegetarian-friendly ramen, however, was exclusive only to a few ramen shops in Tokyo. Every once in a while, Starbucks came up with something new. So you might go in there just to get milk, and end up getting a bunch of stuff you didn’t know you wanted. The “product description” reads like a bullet-pointed list from one of the Japanese game industry’s beloved PowerPoint presentations, which got sent to Amazon administrators on mistake. That’s how they keep them coming. If you want to go see a no-name band play at a bedroom-sized bar, it’s going to cost you around $40. That’s a joke. It’s like seeing a cockroach scatter from behind the TV and up into a crack in the ceiling just before you shut off the light to go to bed in a seedy motel: now you have to sleep with that knowledge. Then there’s the issue of movie stars. If Paris Hilton were Japanese, they’d literally have her anchoring the fucking national news. I could rattle off curious examples for hours — like how “Indian” curry powder I liked once happily advertised “Now With Beef Extract” on the can. A coworker prepared a new variety of cup ramen for lunch; another co-worker looked at it and said “UMASOOOOOU” like he was on TV. The guy just kept yelling it in the exact same tone of voice every time he got hit. . God, I can hardly stand to be in front of it. You really came to feel like you were in Asia, what with people screaming everywhere, like they would in an epic Chinese marketplace scene in an adventure film. Maybe these things really don’t bother other people so much. This was also the guy (or girl) who was always out all night Friday night, and never got home until around 2pm on Saturdays. JAPANESE MOVIES SUCK Okay, “Ponyo” was one of the best films I’ve ever seen in my life , though for the most part modern Japanese films kind of blow. My excuse that I was just the vocalist, so I needed to keep my throat pure. Producers taking a niche and encouraging it — like, say, we have maids, right? Maids creep me the hell out. Who knows what the products have to be? There’s a lot of at-wall shit-flinging. “You forgot to say good morning.” “Yeah, I know, dude. You’d figure something would compute in the smoker’s brain, when they hold their burning cigarette as far away from their own face as possible — at toddler-eyeball-burning height — that maybe, just maybe, the smoke coming out of their cigarette tip might bother other people as much as it actually bothers them. You might have heard that the Japanese work insanely hard, or that some people die from overwork. Approximately 60 million people live within an hour’s commute of Central Tokyo 3. What the hell is that about? The answer is: nothing. SOME JAPANESE OFFICE TRADITIONS ARE GENUINELY TERRIFYING Every once in a while, you’re outside, and you find a huge crowd of people in suits and ties. I look inside, at all the old people. Usually, it’s anime. In short — and maybe this is just a theory — if I move someplace new, I like it for a while, until finally I can’t stand it. Fuji PIC [Flickr] Smoking PIC [Flickr] Bacon Sushi PIC [Flickr]. High school students wear uniforms. They’re doing this to show that they have some energy — any energy at all. Like, during orientation at a Japanese company, you’re told to use the word ” Otsukaresamadesu! ” when greeting other employees either in the hallway, at the coffee machine, or even on a train station platform on the weekend. People unable to get in are then forced to think really hard about getting in next time. I don’t like this form of comedy. What does this have to do with videogames? Have you ever played a game, really liked it, and then found that the sequel went and added something you didn’t want, or something that just didn’t apply to you? I hate when that happens! Also, that many times the people old enough to make important decisions at the companies producing your favorite videogames are literally stupid and/or ignorant enough to think that bacon is not meat. Hostess clubs have become the stuff of video games in recent years, and I hesitate to postulate that the idea of a dating simulation video-game was born of the oldest traditional ancestors of hostess clubs. So, sometimes, this person who’s just been bumped on accident sharply and angrily bumps into someone else, on purpose. First of all, her saying she’d “heard about it” was stated so generically that she could have been indicating she’d heard about it from a friend or from some media source. Many times, the someone being bumped into has had a hard day of apologizing to his superiors six times an hour, perfunctorily, every time they come back into the office from a cigarette break. “Oh,” I said. Many bread-makers substitute oils, butter, or — god help us — margarine. When I first came here, I liked living here. The absolute best example, however, involves a ramen shop I used to go to, because they offered a vegetarian-friendly ramen. I didn’t say good morning to him. Watch people crossing the street with umbrellas. There it was, with bacon. How this relates to videogames : We have centuries of literature and decades of film from which to draw artistic inspiration; we have 1080p graphics and processors capable of displaying tens of thousands of high-definition polygons rotating at the scale speed of sound. He asked if I wanted to join him. Starbucks made lots of different kinds of coffees and treats. “I figured you must smoke because, you know; you play video games.” That’s a real stereotype, man. Eventually, they turned into gambling devices. People who have fun are good employees 4. Now, it’s not. . It’s a different kind of culture. Everyone knows who they are and what they are up to. I have a “problem” stepping completely away from reality. This guy explained to the waitress in painstaking detail that we needed a salad with no chicken , no shrimp , and no tuna in it. To be most blunt, modern Japanese games are so soulless because the only people who make them are people who make games. Well, what about a white guy with a tattoo? He’s obviously not in the yakuza. This bothers me, sure, though what also bothers me is when, on a weekday afternoon, I’m walking on a quaint little street in another town, and the loudspeakers are blaring classical music. The video clips expand to fill our entire TV screens; a picture-in-picture shows the faces of these Famous For Being Famous people as they react. Way back when people first started suiciding abundantly in front of express trains, many train stations installed mirrors across the platform. His closing argument, in the Japanese tradition, was the same as mine, only with one of the words in the first sentence changed: “Look, man, I do eat meat. At least they had the guts to say something public about it. For some reason, the longer I live in Tokyo, the more this really shits me off. I once pointed out, to a police officer, that someone was smoking in the no-smoking zone, and asked if he would fine him, and the cop simply asked me for my ID, passport, and visa papers. I will not embellish my translation: “Graphics are very pretty: the game is on a high-end console.” “Innovative RPG battle system: different from other RPG battle systems.” Here’s the one that actually scared me of the whole world for a couple of minutes: “Feels like a game: is easy to play, and features level design that will not stress the player .” I feel like I’ve seen into a confidential document, here. They must have moved the coffee machine like twenty-four times in one year. It’s a cliched kind of situation. And though game designers all know that more interesting methods of communication are possible, when you hit enemies in Final Fantasy XIII , huge numbers fly out in every direction. Here’s what I think of these words: They exist to cut the bullshit out of life. THE PASSIVE AGGRESSION It’s hard to find a garbage can in Tokyo. My main beef here is that, in the hip, beautiful town of Koenji, in which I live, the only franchise cafe is a Chokokuro Cafe, not a Starbucks. I never talked to that guy again! From that day on, when I arrived in the office and he was the only other person there, I wold snap my fingers, point directly at him, and then, when I had gotten his attention, I’d give him a sharp military salute, letting some huge “HOOH” sound escape the back of my throat. The venue gets to keep the money from the drink sales. What are these old people in these pachinko parlors doing? The generation gap between these people and my grandmother — between cruises around the world and zombification within a pachinko parlor — is only a decade and a half, at the most. The customer is already in the store, and they’re going to keep yelling at them, telling them to come in. That’s why the city is so clean — the people carry their garbage everywhere. They say things like “SUGOOOOI” when something impressive happens. Animal Crossing is more or less a game about communication, in which your only rewards come from doing good deeds. If you don’t go to a company party, you’re not part of the team. Well, five months later, I’ve never seen or heard of anyone getting fined. On the other hand, I didn’t get to enter the Dragon Quest bar, and that sucked. According to friends who regularly eat “normal” ramen, the vegetarian ramen was unique and delicious. You know how football players get into a huddle before a game, bump fists and yell “GOOOOOO TEAM”? It’s like that, only they’re doing it after successfully Achievement Unlocked: The Drunkening. Huge, horse-choking, golden, gleaming five-digit numerals explode outward everywhere. They’re probably still at their desks, answering the phones, right about now, at four AM on Sunday, waiting for that day when they won’t be answering the phones anymore. THE COPYCATS, THE UP-GIVERS It is my opinion that Japanese businesses generally suck at marketing. In the days of dating simulations and of actual slot machines and lottery tickets that could produce a jackpot from a minimal investment, in a society of pedestrians whose every waking moment is some form of game, shackles made of words with meanings that don’t always add up to their practical use contribute to the bottling up of what I believe to be some pretty fuckin’ weird shit, man. Maybe the rage of this current moment is, in fact, a last-ditch effort to affect some change before I can’t care less anymore. Also, games tend to pretty much always cost $100 on their release dates here. That’s a little weird. “I just ordered you a salad!” The salad came. In other news, looking at my outline of to-be-written bullet points, I am struck by just how many of them concern screaming. Like, there was this guy who dressed up roughly as a player from the “Lion King” musical, stood on stage, and chanted like at the beginning of “The Circle of Life.” He would occasionally stop, be awkwardly silent for a moment, and then start chanting again. Without getting too heavy into specifics, let’s just say that the Japanese entertainment industry is like what would happen if, every single year, One Movie Studio released precisely three films each starring Batman, Superman, Spider-man, and Iron Man, with the same actor in the lead role of all of them. The old men don’t like people who are not in the same exact situation as themselves. It’s a little . No one wants to hurt anyone else’s money. And that, basically, is what’s been on my mind the past five years. This means my drummer can’t work out in my gym with me. However, since phrases like “lard-ass” and “tub of lard” successfully penetrated to the deepest levels of the collective modern English-speaking human consciousness around twenty years ago, food companies all over the place are avoiding the word’s appearance on their ingredient labels. If you do use the coupon, it does disappear. If you don’t purchase the drink ticket, they won’t let you in. That kind of bothers me. I mentioned in my last column that trends only move forward into the mainstream because someone in marketing decides what the next big thing is going to be. Japanese television is a way of programming the mannerisms of tomorrow’s society and/or/by propagating the mannerisms of yesterday. Not long after this happened, the chain coincidentally took off. Why not “Tim-san”? I’m required to put “san” on the end of their names. You know how they die? The same way that kid in Korea died while playing Counter-Strike : The very act of sitting and staring at a computer screen becomes something of an addiction in and of itself; they simply forget to use the toilet, or maybe have an aneurysm. By “trying”, I mean they’re putting up signs everywhere that say you’ll be fined 2,000 yen if you smoke. STOP APOLOGIZING TO ME So yesterday, at my favorite used book store: a guy held a mouthpiece and spoke over the PA, repeating the same message for the duration of my perplexed wandering: “DEAR HONORABLE CUSTOMERS: THERE IS NO EXCUSE: IT IS WITH GRAVE FEAR IN OUR HEARTS THAT WE APOLOGIZE SINCERELY FOR MOVING EVERYTHING IN THE STORE. Then you’re up to your ears in nickels (“in bed with a girl who probably disrespects you as much as you disrespect her”). It doesn’t always work, of course. You might say I could ignore comedy by turning the TV off — not so. Anyway, they consulted the same firm every other month. “Where are you going?” the guy asked. If you’re considering renting the entire first five seasons of “LOST” one episode at a time, you might want to also consider taking out a loan. I ate one of the Chocolate Croissants. Damn it, when I was eight years old , I loved feeling stressed when playing Final Fantasy . As usual, I’m probably over-thinking this. Well, it’s that kind of thing. Instead, rather than take what didn’t work all the time and try to make it actually work all the time, they took what did work, and left it all by itself. In addition to possibly cutting minors off of Japan’s abundant supply of cigarettes, it also makes you, the adult, literally a card-carrying member of a club called “smokers.” My friend claimed his friend was only a casual smoker, and didn’t feel like taking the necessary leap of bureaucracy to join the Smokers’ Club. I think the thing she might have hated most about me was that I didn’t hate her. I don’t like knowing things like that. Western business gurus have been advising young up-and-comers for years to put “President and Founder” on their business card instead of “First and Only Employee.” Well, Tokyo is a pedestrian culture, and on the ground, this advice translate into something terrifying. That’s the busiest pedestrian crossing — and the busiest Starbucks — in the world. “That didn’t work,” someone said. Either way, I’ve never heard a story about someone who got fired directly because they didn’t go to a company party. Bands put out a bunch of money to rent the place out for the night. slam their opened umbrella into someone else’s. Her first explanation was the knee-jerk: “It’s a Japanese thing.” Her second explanation was to give me a history lesson: ” Irasshaimase is a greeting that dates back hundreds of years, when shops were traditionally stalls in a marketplace. SG: We hope you will enjoy being entertained by us, and my apologies in advance: my partner is kind of fat. I’ve lived in Japan for a long time. Every once in a while, you’ll see someone just . Things could, of course, be worse. Starbucks is a western corporation, and forward-thinking enough to say ” Konnichiwa ” (“Hello”) and not ” Irasshaimase .” Okay, let’s say you go into some Japanese franchise cafe, and the hella-hot girl behind the counter immediately prostrates herself by speaking that sharp little sentence-word-knife. Okay: What if they made a Lucky Charms that was all marshmallows? Japanese games, thanks to Chokokuro-like thinking, are now like ramen with more noodles and less soup, because people like the noodles more, and lots of jerks manage to finish the noodles without finishing the soup. CAN VIDEOGAMES MAKE US BETTER PEOPLE? Stephen Totilo can corroborate when I say that I had originally planned to call this month’s column “Can Videogames Make Us Better People?” [ Note From Stephen: Tim speaks the truth. Rather, I’ll blame it and all the things like it. Probably millions of people come to not like anyplace they can call “here.” There’s a chance that I’m overreacting and/or having some mid-life crisis. I was going to say that I’ve noticed little trends in the design of Japanese games and/or game-console software. These are the kinds of things the people who make your favorite Japanese games are forced to do every day. It shows you the shit out of how many hit points of damage you’re doing. I can’t really say why — maybe because I didn’t grow up with it? No, that can’t be it: I once met a hardcore Japanese punk rock dude who brought up his own out-creeped-ness with the semantics of Japanese customary greetings completely independent of my input. The vegetarian people featured the ramen shop in a magazine. The tension is building. People who can apologize well are respected! Be sure to apologize every time you pick up the phone! Miss one, and you’ll lose points! Your score in this game is represented by the balance of your bank account. This explanation, recently, actually drew the serious response, “Well, if you can’t kill the animal, you can’t eat it!” This, tangentially, highlights another problem I have with Japan — that people don’t get sarcasm or irony, though maybe I’m wrong here, and maybe the person who gave that response was just a genius wielding his own sarcasm so fake-seriously. So most people who buy new games race through them lovelessly so they can sell them back to the local used shop before the buyback price drops. A tenuous video-game connection I can think of off the top of my head is when Eiji Aonuma told an interviewer that Zelda fans are so faithful because puzzles in Zelda games make the player “feel smart.” On the one hand, maybe making consumers feel smart, or at least thoughtful, makes them end up spending more money somewhere down the line. —- tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net , which is a fancy way of saying he’s the founder and one of three completely unpaid employees. They wonder, “Why me?” Maybe this stirs up violent feelings in them. People aren’t having sex, and they’re not trying to set the world on fire financially, either. :-/ POSITIVE NEGATIVES Again, this is a language issue, though again, I am going to presume that it accounts for a decent amount of passive aggression. Fat Guy: We’re very glad to be here. Hostesses in hostess clubs do not have sex with the customers. In a country so dense with rules and polite gestures, you’d figure less people would so flagrantly brandish cigarettes on the street. This is the agenda: to never stress any players again. With the service industry so twisted to a point where “chatting up a shop girl” is literally considered by men-about-town to be the hardest form of pick-up, how do Japanese people make friends? The answer seems to be that, in any sense other than meeting people through school, work, or companies related to their company, they don’t. So the people of my town live in fear and annoyance. I once put a note in his mailbox: “You know, if you’re going to blow the smoke out the window — if you don’t love smoking enough to just close the windows and turn your apartment into a hot-box, maybe you should just quit.” He never quit. Now, the ultimate pick-up is to score with a girl who you were willing to pay money simply to talk to, who you met under circumstances that allowed her to do anything with you except relate to you sexually. Instead, I’ll just say that, yes, I live in Tokyo and I have for many years, and that I do understand that many of the complaints here are maybe particular to Tokyo. You might wonder, “How is this happen?” Man, there are so many reasons. I have a lot of fun, lately, making up the weirdest fake reasons for not eating meat: My favorite one is saying that I don’t eat meat because I wouldn’t want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill. As my frame of reference for “Not Japan,” I’ll try to use San Francisco. Chatting up a shop-girl used to be the ultimate pick-up, and it was because of the difficulty of said pick-up that “talking to a girl who is involved in some capacity in the service industry” became a certifiable fetish. Eventually, they had a cafe. It’s real life. I was dating the woman who might have sincerely hated me around the time this happened, because she mentioned having heard about it, and wanting to eat it. Being serious about parties and requiring all employees to attend or it’s they ass is not nearly as bad as forcing an employee to disembowel himself as punishment for the feudal Japanese equivalent of jamming the paper shredder. There’s this “Neon Genesis Evangelion” pachinko machine, based on the popular animated series from over ten years ago. We parted ways both knowing that we were right, only, to this day, I still kind of have the edge, because I actually was right. I don’t like how almost every restaurant has a smoking section, and you invariably have to go through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section. We can live on it, though if we’re making it ourselves, it’s something we have to devote our lives to. You charge them up at terminals in the stations. Taspo had something of the same effect on my friend’s friend. “So much for that idea,” someone else said. When there’s a party, he’ll be the guy who immediately grabs the menu, counts up the number of people at the table, asks for a show of hands, says “Who is NOT drinking beer?” He’ll bark to the waitress how many beers we need, and bring us some of this fried chicken cartilage and these potato things, and some edamame beans, and some salad, and some pickles, too. I think they just want to find an excuse to keep the employees after hours, screaming in a circle to psych themselves up for the act of moving shelves and stock. Well. A big tarp went up where the shops used to be. You wouldn’t understand. If I’m going to be forced to play it, I might as well live somewhere I can get affordable groceries more suited to my lifestyle. Sometimes, the consoles themselves are so yellow. And though Famitsu ’s reviews consist of four viewpoints, the fans are prone to more or less always consider the score as a total out of forty rather than four scores on a scale of one to ten. Every song is about people meeting for the first time, about how they’ll never forget when they met for the first time, or how “because of you positive [adjective]“. Only rather than humbly ask the vegetarian magazine if it was alright to remove the vegetarian magazine logo, they decided to humbly apologize that the recipe had changed , and the vegetarian ramen’s broth now included pork bone marrow, so they would have to stop advertising as safe for vegetarians. That’s why they call it real life! THE STEREOTYPING My gym refuses entry / membership to anyone with a tattoo. ” One particular comedy routine I once witnessed involved two guys — a skinny guy and a fat guy. Every single time I would order the pasta, the waitress would utter, in the same practiced tone: “I’m sorry — it doesn’t have very much stuff in it”. Okay, this happens in the West, too — BioWare got started from the idea of making medical software. Try skipping a party as an employee of a Japanese company: Instantly, you’re The Guy Who Skipped The Party, you’re The Guy Who Doesn’t Care About The Company. I guess I look like a bit of a flake. You are really not helping your reputation by refusing to drink, here.” I’m not going to blame just this society-fragment for the poor state of the economy, or even the low birth rate. Entertainment distilled to an impenetrable essence: Final Fantasy XIII is such a good example for this: They took out all the towns and all of the situations where you feel like you own the world in some small part. Okay, here’s what I think is the crux of my problem. SHIT BE EXPENSIVE UP IN HERE To exist in Tokyo is to stand in a packed rush-hour train with your nose pressed against hard against the back of the head of the black hole named “Supply And Demand.” It costs like $25 to see a movie. An attendant would then cut the samurai’s head off with a sword. It’s so huge, and loud, right there in the middle of my trendy street. In China, however, nearly half of everything is vegetarian. Above, I mentioned how girls (and dudes) working in normal cafes, or any kind of restaurant, immediately place themselves a level lower than you, using very ancient, stilted words. (If this idea morbidly amuses you, try Kobo Abe’s novel Kangaroo Notebook , in which a company man simply writes “Kangaroo Notebook” on a proposal form, exciting his boss’s interest and turning his life into a stressful hell. The sounds were pleasing, the friction of the pen on the DS screen felt just right (I’ve “played” a friend’s copy). Drinking = having fun 2. You can’t. This happens a lot with games. However low the numerical scores may be, however, the reviewers seldom say anything negative. I don’t want cigarette smoke near my organic vegetables! Hel-lo? That makes them pretty much not organic anymore! You might as well just be buying them from a hobo, at that point. At my orientation for one company, the Human Resources Girl — whose face (figuratively) literally screamed “Hall Monitor” — was going over the “Good Morning!” protocol. When is something like Nintendo’s “Finance Diary” going to be implemented into ATMs? Well, cash will near-completely fade away, at some point in the future. I’m sure if I said I’d feel sorry for the kids, someone would point out how Japanese people seem to pretty much never get lung cancer — maybe because of all the green tea, or walking — so it’s not so bad if the kids grow up to be smokers. He came over to my desk about two minutes after I’d settled in. I’m sure it’s only ever happened indirectly. Or else it’s just guys with huge hair and impossible weapons shouting jargon. He was really popular for a while. They hit eighty, join my gym, and start screaming. “Chokokuro” is a little abbreviation, like “Pokemon” is to “Pocket Monsters.” “Chokokuro” is short for “Chokoreeto Kurowasan.” (In Japanese, as in French, the “t” in “Croissant” is silent.) Starbucks evolved from a small chain of cafes to a huge one by consistently introducing new products, constantly pushing the envelope. It doesn’t even move. I call it “Everyone’s Uncle”. A friend let me in on this secret. “I’ve got to run,” I said. Believe it or not, though, I am the kind of person who focuses on the positive things until, one at a time, I manage to wear them out. You just might have not had the same semantic prison constructed around you by all the people subliminally intoning “You are tired!” to you every thirty fucking seconds. In all world cultures, meat has always been associated with an act of sacrifice. They just got out of a mandatory company party in the nearest wooden-submarine-like Japanese restaurant whose menu consists of whatever fell off the garbage truck as it peeled away from a flock of particularly aggressive crows that morning. I say the comedy is antiquated and Bob-Hope-like. I can’t imagine anyone playing Dynasty Warriors , by the way, without a cigarette in their mouth. I had fun, one day, by taking mental note of what games were the yellowest. I’m sure the publishers have crunched the numbers a thousand times, and come up with some reason to justify not lowering the initial price of a typical game. Like, “Here you go! Listen to this music! This is how you should feel right now!” Life isn’t a television drama, or a movie, or a video game, man. This is really common: it seems like they have no idea what the company is going to be. Like, they have this cell-phone game now where you raise a hostess like a virtual pet. Sure. The account changes sometimes. You can see where this is going. Man, I hate this kind of guy. Maybe this impression is born from the fact that breathing in Japanese arcades is pretty much exactly like dunking your head in a bucket of hot water and dead cigarettes. Actually, I just made that definition up; let’s actually check Dictionary.com: hello interjection 1. Lots of people who I meet as tourists seem enamored with the idea when they first encounter it. The voice of these advertisements is an old woman who sounds like she got lost on the walk home from the supermarket. 3. To determine whether this is the case or not, I plan to type up a list of things I don’t like about Japan. EVERYTHING IN JAPAN HAS MEAT IN IT Everything in Japan has meat in it. It’s the rule. This is the guy who Don’t Do Shit at the office usually. I researched this topic a couple years back, and one of the recurring theories was that game publishers know that used shops exist, and they wouldn’t like to cannibalize their businesses by ultimately producing fewer used games. Anyway, lots of people started cafes, for some reason or another, right around the time Starbucks really took off. Hmm. I tend to avoid white bread on principle, eating only whole wheat bread. Well, no one likes it after a while, least of all the people who are doing it. People enjoyed drinking / eat / inhaling them. “I’M SORRY, IT DOESN’T HAVE VERY MUCH STUFF IN IT” I used to go to this restaurant with a really delicious pepperoncini pasta. FG: Oh, I’m sorry. They take up all of the sidewalk. I wrote about this before. THE MANDATORY PARTIES The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. How are you doing today?” “. Another form of Japanese comedy involves two men standing on a stage simultaneously. If you don’t use the coupon, it will never disappear from your “Coupon Inbox”. He was surprised. You might have similar cards in your city elsewhere in the world. He paused. It’s like, append the positive form of this verb to the end of the stem of the verb in the sentence “It’s possible to do that”, and you can make the sentence mean “It’s not possible to do that.” Though since verbs end the sentences in Japan, it’s more like “Yes, we can do that for you — NOTTTTTT.” I mean, how is that “polite”? How is that the way to deal with people in business? Do people feel really great whenever they use that in a professional conversation? Do they feel like they just scored a four-hit combo in Street Fighter IV ? EVERYONE’S UNCLE There’s a distinct personality type existing all over Japan. A perfect example is the Amazon.co.jp page for Sega and tri-Ace’s RPG End of Eternity . After my grandfather died, my grandmother set about spending as much of his money as quickly as possible. In fact, he’s going to get promoted, and he’s going to be telling you what to do, and he’s going to be pulling figures off the internet, and going, “Oh, it looks like this game called Halo 3 has twenty-seven guns in it. Everyone in the office then shouts “Good morning!” back to you. About half of everyone wanted to work their way up a big company. Now, there’s nothing wrong with limiting one’s ambitions, in theory. JAPANESE COMEDY IS NOT FUNNY I can’t get behind Japanese comedy. As far as game design goes, it’s not that incredible, because the video clips on the display screen really have absolutely nothing to do with anything aside from the animated series from which they’ve been extracted. They made a lot of little pastries, you know, just flinging shit at the wall. Good employees will never, ever get fired Maybe you know the story about how Gran Turismo got started because Kazunori Yamauchi, on his first day in the Sony Computer Entertainment offices, wrote out a sample game design idea consisting only of the words “I want to drive my car on my television.” What you may not know is that this is more or less the way many Japanese companies have been doing everything creative for maybe fifty years. Oh no! You messed up today! The company lost money. If I were to blindly and deafly heed the command semantically buried in his polite perfunctory greeting, it would require me to abandon my act of genuinely curious commercialism. In The Real Life, I am stress-free. He mentioned how Kurt Cobain apparently smoked five packs a day. It’s a great system. The price is fixed at pretty much the precise point at which movie tickets will sell out CDs are so expensive because, ever since the earliest days of CDs, rental has been legal. “I thought you said you were in a band?” Just like that: You’re in a band. Schell says we might read a new “Star Trek” book, and then be told we’ve just Unlocked the Achievement of having read 500 books, and we might feel dumb that this is our 500th book. This is why Weekly Famitsu — a game magazine — is noteworthy. This is interesting because, sometimes, you’ll be looking at your coupon box, and go, “Man, I could have saved like fifteen percent on like six pizzas! If only I ate more pizza! ” This epiphany is about as richly cathartic as any big story reveal or any any battle-system-related “Aha” in any Japanese RPG. . “What I mean is, what kind of comedy is it that you really would ‘love’ to do? Give me a for example.” “It’s . (Not saying that friends you make at work aren’t “real” friends, though hey.) It is only in a social climate where chatting up a shop-girl is considered arcane black magic that a concept like a hostess club can exist. hard to just think of something off the top of my head.” “Here’s one you can use — just come out and immediately say, ‘So, I just want to confess, I haven’t jerked off in four years. Moving everything in a major electronics retail store, however, just feels tacky. The second person bumped in our little example is officially the victim of a violent outburst. It used to be okay. Chances are, if you’ve only spent a short time in Japan, you might have found it endearing. This works, because groceries are very impulse-friendly. I don’t like eating dirty things. That’s the half I eat. Experimental music: These guys know what they’re doing! 2. The Japanese have distilled “social life” to a point where it is literally a part of work. It has bacon in it.” “You don’t like bacon?” “It’s meat.” “No it’s not!” The man was being deadly, gravely serious. I would like to say that I intend to flesh out each of the following bullet points in such a way as to minimize hate mail, though that would be undermining the creativity of hate mailers. Animal Crossing and Brain Training were extremely popular, money-making software products, though both of them had feet planted in The Real. He was immediately greeted with an automaton-like voice: “QUANTIFY: ‘ENCOURAGEMENT’”. He looked them over, gave them back, and turned away. Dragon-Quest -themed bars in Roppongi aren’t the only places to do this. You may know hostess clubs from the Ryu ga gotoku or Yakuza games. Why not treat them to, you know, one higher class of a food? The human resources department passed the idea around, and figured it couldn’t hurt. The idea is that the venues are not primarily places people go to listen to music: they are places owned by people who want to make money from bands who want a place to play a show. Seeing as big business was the thing putting the Japanese all over the map, most kids around then had been studying business. Japan hasn’t really changed, either. In addition to being a metaphor for the en-masse bottling-up of passive aggression in Tokyo, it’s also the truth. And it’s hard to find any other critical voices in Japan. They have a little magazine — which, in Japan, means that it’s huge, glossy, printed on cardboard, costs around $20, and comes with a free six-hour DVD. Also, whenever there’s a popular book in Japan, they’ll make both a movie and a TV series out of it at the same time. Also, I suspect that the Pokemon “Koffing” isn’t a symbol of the evils of pollution — he’s Japan’s Joe Camel, hooking kids on the power and might of smoke. Maybe the Japanese don’t get severe brain damage from screaming all night in the death-like frigidity of a winter night, though they do sometimes pass out. . Damn it! This topic applies to me pretty directly, so I have researched it on and off over the years. I have a “habit” of applying the “rules” of the game of life to the things I do for “fun.” I might have mentioned before: I never believed in Santa Claus, et cetera. Actually, let’s get the THINGS I LOVE ABOUT JAPAN out of the way, first. You look it up in a dictionary, and it’ll say “Word used to greet someone in a friendly manner”. Masturbation is a taboo topic, so, no.” Here I could talk about how EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING , and how you really need to only know maybe six words — one of them ” wasurenai ” (“[I / he / she / it] [will not / does not] forget”) to get the basic idea of what they’re always saying. In Hollywood, yes, it’s true that almost everything is a remake or a sequel. Sometimes, they love it! Sometimes, they get severe brain damage, too. I know what’s meat and what’s not meat,” was my ultimate closing argument. Then there’s the really old guy who gets the lightest possible resistance band, wraps it around the side of the squat rack, through the Smith press, and over the bench press, effectively commandeering half of the free weight area; he holds it in place, and screams. That’s why we call it ‘protocol.’” This instant was actually the very first time I begin to ponder the logistics of actually going ahead and being homeless. In such cases, the word indicated to customers that they should come closer to the stall, that they should buy their little dried fishes at your stall, and not the stall next to you, which sells the same things.” This explanation was good enough. Eventually, we’ll enter another topic, which is much more directly related to video games. It’s worth noting that I got friendly with a guy in the office — and one day, he happened to be first in the office, and I was second. They never have a reason for doing this. I knew from the beginning that I would never “fit in” whether I wanted to or not; well, this was probably around when the rest of the world got the memo. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE ASK THE NEAREST EMPLOYEE.” It’s like, man — “really good at apologizing” is a shitty thing to write on a culture’s resume. In short, if you’ve ever worked at an office anywhere in the world, you’ve done about the same degree of actual work that Japanese people do in Japanese companies. At the end of the day, it was the same thing. The game never shows you how many hit points the monsters have. These products were so successful that the certifiable geniuses at Nintendo considered, developed, released, and then reaped the benefits of such products as “My Finance Diary” and Tomodachi Collection . They’re screaming for screaming’s sake. The underlying principle at work here — that businesspeople realize some people will ignore an entire selection of products because one does not appeal to them — is universal, I guess. “Why is he telling us to come into the store if we’re already in the store?” “Beats me, man,” was my roommate’s response. They’re all drunk. Once, another foreign employee at another company suggested to the management that they try doing things like ordering pizza — or the Japanese equivalent — for the employees, every once in a while. Sometimes, someone bumps into someone, purely by accident. The guys in this company were the type to sit at their desks with bowls of terrible convenience-store ramen through the night. For example, Kazunori Yamauchi hadn’t even filled out the form completely for Gran Turismo ’s proposal. They do this because this is how it used to be, so that’s probably how it should be, forever. His explanation was that employees who are actually happy, or content, or who feel appreciated, generally do better work. This is just how we do things in Japan, Tim.” “Well, [Name-removed]- san , you can try putting ‘ san ‘ on the end of my fucking name from now on, then, you know, as practice.” Really — all these customs and politeness and whatever, and they go and throw out the customary name suffix and just call me “Tim”. A minute later, I was about to get up. It was a very real, legitimate excuse. Seats are limited in cinemas 4. Well. So, why do they let so many clearly insane -looking octogenarians into the gym? We have one guy who looks like Mister Magoo. It’s not just comedy. Someone must have noticed how close Japanese polite society stands to a brave new service industry populated by individuals who literally proclaim to every customer, “You are the master! I am the servant! You are awesome! I am scum!” Maybe there was a manga with a maid in it, and maybe some people thought that was funny and made jokes about it; it escalated, and they started drawing their own comics; eventually, the marketers caught wind of it, and it became A Thing. Not two years later, Saint Marc’s Cafe had changed the name of all their locations to “Chokokuro Cafe”. I’ve expressed my dislike for it to many people, including people trying to make it in the field of this very form of comedy. So now, of course, the ultimate pick-up is to sleep with a hostess who you meet by being a customer in her workplace. Tokyo is the city that invented the transparent umbrella — that’s a plus, I guess — and it probably came about to help people walk without bumping into one another. The coupons expire in two weeks. When I first came to Japan, and learned that ” irasshaimase ” meant “come [into the store]!” I expressed a certain amount of confusion to the dude who was playing the part of my tour guide. However, the kid in the Jeansmate, years ago, wasn’t standing behind a stall. (Recall Indiana Jones in “The Temple of Doom” — “Hindus don’t eat meat! Something’s wrong here.”) Or how the Japanese variety of Bac-Os bacon(-flavored) bits, which are completely vegan-friendly in America, list “Pork Extract” as the top ingredient, even though — according to a foreign friend brave enough to eat them regularly — they smell and taste exactly like American Bac-Os. Some people are good enough at pachinko to not even need a job. THE EMOTION GESTAPO In an earlier column (” Stop Telling Me What To Do “), I talked about a system of loudspeakers set up in my neighborhood, blaring advertisements for local businesses. (Mostly.) Might these things have some connection? If this is the direction things are headed, then the games of the future are going to be fuckin’ scary . They do this so you can prove that you paid for the drink, should you roll into another convenient store glugging away. Every time the automatic doors open as a customer enters or leaves, if one of the windows in my home is open, I can hear the dense Eurobeat emanating out. One of these Japanese franchise cafes was called Saint Marc’s. “You know, aside from ‘ irasshaimase ‘, they’re not using actual words, most of the time.” He had prior job experience, see. I walk by that pachinko parlor every time I go to JR Koenji Station. American supermarkets will sometimes advertise a gallon of milk for $.99. Business is like a shark: it moves forward, or it stops breathing. The one thing we all have in common is that we sometimes ride the train during nighttime rush hour, and we’re not wearing suits. Nothing stuck. Men say “UMAI!” immediately after taking a minuscule bite of food, sometimes before they even swallow, in this nasal voice, in a tone like they just ran up a flight of stairs . They approached the old-fashioned microphones, stopped, bowed to the audience, and began: Skinny Guy: Hello everyone! Nice to meet you! We are [Dumb Name of Comedy Duo]. That makes sense. They were known for an edgier decor than your old-school Japanese cafes, or than Starbucks’s down-home feel. What this has to do with videogames : When you buy Super Famicom games in used game shops, the gray plastic is very often stained deep, ugly yellow from existing in houses packed to bursting with cigarette smoke. Both: Goodnight everybody! And that was it. They could just not have coffee at all. He didn’t stop pausing. SCREAMING IS THE MESSAGE I can’t have not mentioned this before: Employees at shops in Japan scream all the time, and sometimes with no reason. It seeps directly into normal people’s conversations. Maybe, in the Japanese version, he was saying ” Yamero !”, which pretty much means “Quit it!” or “Cut it out!” Man, it was really weird to hear that. Right? So what the hell? They just immediately changed their name to reflect the name of the first product that brought them moderate success. The birth rate in Japan is plummeting, and something like 33% of newlywed couples ask for two master bedrooms in their new homes. A friend claims that his friend actually quit smoking when the Japanese rolled out a new mandatory cigarette vending machine ID proxy card called “Taspo”: to get a Taspo, you have to go through this process of proving your age, supplying a photo, et cetera. Well, they’ve done fucked up a whole lot of shit, financially speaking. Oh, god. “This salad . In that talk, Carnegie-Mellon University professor Jesse Schell envisions a future in which everything is game-designed. I literally have to say “I’m allergic to alcohol” 40 times before they’ll stop pushing me to take a drink. Japanese comedy finds a way out of the TV. The boss is nowhere in sight. Of course, it’s all a front. If you want to like music over here, you need to be willing to surrender all of your disposable income. The majority of Japanese comedians are people who stand on a stage reciting one catch phrase over and over again. I haven’t changed. Japanese people always tell me, “Oh, it’s just a Japanese thing. So when I told a friend, “Oh, I’m going to go home tonight and write a column for Kotaku.com,” he said, “Oh, so you’re going to write about Japan?” For a second, I thought he had read my mind. Maybe all three of these things are part of the same problem. You can’t ride a train, sometimes, without being surrounded by catch-phrases. I learned a lot about marketing from that woman, literally and figuratively. It took me a while to really catch on to what this is. The former is just a simple kind of productivity software, which you can use to keep track of how much money you spend, and on what. When you think about it, it makes some kind of marketing sense. Why encourage these niches? Eventually, the people who started the joke see how seriously it’s being taken. What’s most intriguing is that — every time I’ve ever talked to a Japanese businessperson about a product that was actually monstrously successful, it seems that the one thing the boss respected most about their proposal was how it was worded so simply. His precision is hardly creepy. It’s pretty terrifying to see how often it happens. Man, life is like the world’s most boring MMORPG. That, or they go play pachinko. It was also distinctly lacking in iridescent grease bubbles floating on the surface of the ramen. This group of maybe forty young men and women in suits are screaming in unison. Oh, and then, there’s the creepy SOB who wears a track suit, holds two one-kilogram weights at shoulder-level, stands in the middle of the free weights area, and shakes his hands almost like he’s miming running up a flight of stairs. I said I didn’t smoke. However, if you translate this idea into English, it comes across as unforgivably stilted. Immediately, she has placed herself beneath you. Maybe the arcades only exist because people need some excuse to get away from their smoke-averse significant other and puff away. The speakers are illegally placed; the businesses advertising on the service have never met a representative of the advertising service. I have spent a large part of my life circling the globe, immersing myself in languages, and tolerating the hell out of some world cultures. (Among other things.) What this has to do with videogames : Once, when I was working for a Japanese game company as something of a liaison to help them develop games with a more future-proof “western” method, I suggested that every employee be, at all points in the process, encouraged to offer input on things such as game design. Actually, we would have needed to make reservations more than twenty-four hours in advance: We could only reserve a spot between eight or nine PM on Wednesday between twelve and four on Tuesday. So yeah, I’ve kind of come to hate on Chokokuro Cafe at every opportunity: If they’re so willing to just settle down and marry their proverbial high school sweetheart, why do they try to keep expanding? Eventually, they’re going to find they’ve expanded too far, spread themselves too thin. It plays video clips which, somehow, relate to the player which pegs or mechanisms have moved, so he knows how much strength to apply to rotating the cylindrical controller, with how much pressure to expel the little steel balls. In Japan, they’ve had these microchip-equipped cards for a decade. If there were more people in the office, and not just me, they would think you were not part of the team. That’s a machine there’s got to be somebody raging against. Every other game is one of two scenarios: 1. It’s a pretty simple kind of pasta — just oil, garlic, and peppers. FG: Anyway, let’s get star—hey! Did you just call me fat? SG: No, I didn’t. It exists. It sounds more like stereotyping in that context — that a “nice,” “good” person wouldn’t have a tattoo. The kid was calling it out repeatedly as he folded jeans a few aisles away from the jeans that interested me. It’s terrifying to see so many dozens of seventy-something man, drunk, on a train, in a suit, on the way home at midnight on a Wednesday. Chokokuro Cafe has a smoking section, separated from the non-smoking section by a maybe-four-foot-tall wall of plastic. We argued about it in the politest tones possible for maybe three minutes. Very seldom are the words actual words. THE WEATHER This was 2009. BONUS ROUND: At least you get the opportunity to apologize to the boss. I look at these people, and I think, where in the hell are we going? A friend in real estate once told me that no building ever turned into a pachinko parlor or a love hotel will ever see life as anything else. In his presentation, Schell mentions a little tree-shaped virtual-pet-kind-of thing on the dashboard of the Toyota Prius. Anyway, they start chanting something. Anime is terrible. Apparently, some stores actually demand that employees enlisted as barkers absolutely refrain from using actual words. The experience spawned a lifetime of seeking out digital stress and triumphing over it. It’s getting fairly ridiculous. We’ve got, uhh, about sixteen people.” And then he pumps his fist and says, “We’re just gonna hafta work overtime!” No we’re not, asshole. For now, I’ll summarize: Hostess clubs are bars that hire girls who dress entirely in the modern fashion befitting girls who work at hostess clubs. (This is going to be important later.) How prone are you to start a conversation with someone in such a situation? Probably not very. On the other side of the highway, visible from my living room window, stands a large pachinko parlor. I’ll try to start with small things and work my way up to big things. If you grew up here, maybe you’d be okay with all of it.” Well, sure. He wasn’t given his fifteen minutes of fame because he was somehow more appealing or interesting than everyone else working in the field — it was simply his turn in line. She took cruises around the world. I suppose the number of smokers actually has gone down in the past years, since I’ve been here. Eventually, I went there one day, and the pasta had shredded octopus tentacles and bacon in it. His alarm clock, programmed to go off every morning at 5am, woke me up every Saturday. Don’t ask me to prove this, because it will extend this already bloated chunk of pseudo-prose by another six thousand words. So, it used to be, the ultimate Achievement Unlocked was to pick up a girl who is bound by the rules of her society to not converse casually with you. The word means, more or less, “You are tired!” The progression goes like this: When you see someone in the office before noon, you are to tell them “good morning.” After lunch has finished, leading right up to the end of the day, it’s “You are tired!” So there you have it: Japanese people in the office are expected to work themselves to tiredness before lunch. “Look, man, I don’t eat meat. They say “OMOSHIROOOOOI” when something is interesting. I wonder why. It’s been said, many times, in many ways, that the Japanese are an intense people. Maybe that’s not it. “UMAI!” he yelled, before the heat of the boiling water could even vent out of his mouth. These girls, who usually earn more money than their clients, exist in a culturally unique gray area between customer and employee. When a mild celebrity says a food item “LOOKS DELICIOUS!!” their tone is so rehearsed and sterile that it might as well be a statement of fact. 1. That was a spring nearly ruined. [Note: I only love trains on weekdays around noon, when they're not crowded.] 4. The reason for the tattoo hatred is, so the urban legend goes, to keep the yakuza out of the gym / bathing area. Maybe I can sum up every little point I’m trying to make in this whole word-slab by saying I don’t like that so many people agree to do things that they obviously hate doing. I could never see his face, though I could definitely smell his tobacco, because the smoke exited his window and promptly entered mine. I can’t say for sure, though I reckon many Japanese men inherited certain speech idiosyncrasies by watching catch-phrase-oriented television programs. Or how a coincidentally meat-free soup stock once changed their label to proudly advertise “Now tastes more like crab!” It had never tasted anything like crab. Well, I can now curiously report that, on a recent trip to a super market, I couldn’t find a single loaf of white bread that didn’t have lard in it. I know someone’s going to say I’m a racist, or being intolerant, or whatever, though man, that kind of thing is creepy as hell. The girls are not only willing to talk to the customers — it’s their job , so they have to. They walk and run and walk-run everywhere with the things. “Big budget” in the Japanese film industry usually means that shit was shot on Beta Cam. Most people aren’t. I only once worked for a company big enough to have Gather And Scream events every morning, though I was lucky enough to work in a division with mostly old dudes who weren’t expected to participate, so that made me not expected to participate, either. Now, I don’t. To encourage people to drink, they literally force you to purchase a “ticket” for a drink prior to entering the club. In Japan, everyone just keeps their hands under the table. I don’t know why! I like to take the tape off, stick it to my receipt, and then drop it into the little trash can by the register. The meeting was a terrible failure. I have yet to find a single not-high-class Chinese restaurant in Tokyo that serves a single vegetarian dish. “I can’t eat this. I’m pretty sure the “Minority Report” future will emerge well before I’m old enough to play pachinko. I could complain about this, though I find it easy enough to ignore, so it doesn’t bother me. I get hives when I eat mushrooms. I would know; I’ve tried it. I couldn’t do this, though, because, despite their having nine empty tables, my friend and I weren’t allowed in! You know why? Because we had failed to reserve our table twenty-four hours in advance. Maybe I would have become desensitized to it. They did. Like, we have the word “Hello” in English, right? “Hello” doesn’t mean anything. Well, there you go. TAPE If I buy a drink at a convenience store and say I don’t want a bag, they insist on putting a little piece of tape over the barcode. The reason was obvious: digital games will be everything sooner or later. The bands divide up the ticket sales. Nothing about any one particular video clip deliberately says “Now the little flap on the right side is going to open.” Pachinko machines were originally strictly for amusement. I get really ugly noises — teeth-sucking, lip-flicking, throaty grunts — every time I get on a train. It’s like, what if they made a Cap’n Crunch that was all Crunchberries? Oh wait. I don’t like this because it seems like, if they really think the story is so great, why don’t they pour all that time and effort into making, say, one really spectacular, world-class film out of it? Oh, because of the money. Every employee must do this. So lately, they’re trying to cut down on people smoking. There’s a TV screen in the middle of all pachinko machines, these days. Real estate is expensive 2. We were the only customers in the store. PR is thoroughly integrated into every aspect of business that I’M ALMOST FINISHED I only have a few more things I want to say before I conclude this. New CDs from popular average around $40 each. The old people are the majority, and they don’t like us because we lack the drive they had. They say “OISHISOU!” when something looks delicious. Nobody wants to retire, because if they work a little bit harder, their ideal retirement yacht might grow an extra bedroom. Cows can do other things aside from die and be cut up for steak. When someone is hurt, they typically don’t make a surprised sound such as “Ow”, they say ” itai ” — “[adjective meaning] painful”. The milk is always in the refrigerated section, in the back of the store. It’s a pretty idiotic capsule form of the entire Japanese entertainment industry. Japan is land of the abundant “Famous For Being Famous” class of entertainers. That doesn’t stop them from charging professional prices. They’re just companies. Some women’s magazine must have written a review or a recommendation of it. In Japan, the shame is even thinner. Only — get this — the poster also included the manga panels, so you could know exactly how much the actors looked like the characters in the manga. A couple years later, another person learned I didn’t smoke, and acted surprised. Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms series titles were by far the consistently yellowest of all Super Famicom games. This can’t possibly be unique to me. Okay, here’s one mostly related: In many Japanese offices, you’re required to scream “Good morning!” at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. You know, in any country aside from Japan, 500 yen is about what you’d pay for cover at a dive bar. You can input your salary and bank account balance and all that. It’s inbred trailer-trash in entertainment form: Every season’s new Japanese animation places one-upmanship of every single aspect of the last season higher on their list of priorities than even “make something entertaining.” The same can perhaps be said of all Japanese entertainment, though it’s not relevant anywhere else as much as it is in anime. Movie tickets are as expensive as they are because 1. I think it sounds more like someone just giving up and settling for what they have. A Japanese friend who works in marketing told me this is the “Japanese resolve.” A company sees its fate and resigns itself to it. it’ll only have vegetables in it. I don’t know. This atmosphere is completely manufactured. If I was thirty years old, and I put on a suit, and I’m still wearing the suit at age seventy, and I still don’t have a car, or a chauffeur to drive me home when I’m drunk, or at least money to pay for a taxi, man, I’m taking that fuckin’ suit off. They don’t. Many of my Japanese rock-dude friends report being grunted at pretty often. I don’t like that people are allowed to smoke in my favorite little organic vegetable cafe, right there on the floor with the open kitchen. I went into my favorite local used book store the other day, and couldn’t find anything . The Saint Marc corporation was founded in 1989 by a couple of young people who didn’t know they wanted to have a cafe. A Chinese friend once told me that Chinese restaurants in Japan serve only dishes with meat in them as some kind of subconscious celebration of their finding success in a foreign land. Once, a Japanese co-worker, who had gone to Tokyo University and somehow survived on Planet Earth for more than fifty years without decapitating himself on a bathroom door frame, insisted on my ordering some food at a company party I was forced to attend. NO SUBJECTIVITY Maybe this is the reason games and movies suck: Barely no one in the media ever says anything subjective about anything. Starbuckses the world over are smoke-free. A month later, it was one huge pachinko parlor. Dude took a bite of the ramen, slurping it loudly, like people do on TV, like you’re supposed to do it. I’ve watched ingredient labels with perverse interest over the years. There’s a lot of brain-hacking going on in there. Then there are things like how Dominos Pizza, should you register for their web-based pizza ordering service, will send you digital coupons. Say you enter a Starbucks and the girl behind the counter is hella hot. The comedians or ex-comedians to whom I express this opinion all sigh, say, “You know, man, I’d love to get out there and do some edgy jokes, though that’s just not how it works here, man. . Around this time, a lot of Japanese kids whose parents had ridden high during the Pre-Sony-Walkman-Era boom were just graduating college. At least football players like playing football. It’s a thing insecure Tokyo business owners do when they are afraid of their place being empty at peak hours. I never went there again. They’re standing a circle, completely of their own accord. It’s not much of a “game.” Though there it is. The samurai used to, like, ritualistically scream, kneel, and cut their intestines out with their sword if they were disgraced in battle. They actually have some semblance of subjectivity in their weekly reviews section. I’d probably also get a profound apology. I had excused myself the day before the party, saying I’d only be able to sit in for a half an hour at the most — a moving truck was coming to my apartment that very night. The most common TV show is a genreless, formless, gelatinous entertainment blog in which the Famous For Being Famous sit around a table and view video clips. Yeah, ever since that day my microwave malfunctioned, I can’t reach my hand high enough over my head!” “I don’t get it. Last year there was a movie version of the manga “20th Century Boys.” The poster showed all of the actors in the film, each of them positioned in poses that mirrored poses their characters had assumed in particular memorable panels in the manga. Well, these days, people have iPhones, which are more or less like Japanese cellular phones, only browsing the Internet doesn’t cost six dollars a page load. Every rental joint knows exactly what’s up: Back in the 80s, they sold blank cassette tapes. Once I got back from the toilet, I thought about it some more, and realized that Japanese television is mostly something people put on in the background; it’s wallpaper for conversations. Anyway, last night I was drinking beer—wait, are you SURE you didn’t call me fat? SG: Oh no, I certainly did not. And anyway, maybe some of these people who like videogames enough to learn how to program them might have some decent ideas of what they like or don’t like in game design? What happened, eventually, was an email: “ALL EMPLOYEES ARE REQUIRED TO REPORT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM IMMEDIATELY FOR A BRAINSTORMING SESSION RE: GAME DESIGN”. I suppose the intended audience is dudes who think this sort of thing is hilarious, though what’s the possibility that those games exist so that girls can aspire to be hostesses, and consider the game some kind of primer for their future lifestyle? Where are we headed, then? The producers might be the type of people to think, “Yeah, the hostess club industry exist because of some weird multi-layered passive aggressive need cooked in the crucible of Japanese semantics for centuries, and there’s probably a better role-model for girls, though some girls want to be hostesses already, and it’s more profitable to not try to change their mind.” I realize I sound like one of those conservatives saying they shouldn’t hand out condoms in high school, though man, like George Michael said, “Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it — everybody should “. Like, the biggest electronics stores actually keep ladders on hand so that certain employees can climb the ladders and scream indecipherable words down at the customers, through megaphones. I like this example a lot: Starbucks suddenly existed; people loved it. Good for her. From where she stands at the edge of the synapse marked “Come into the store!” she can just about touch the synapse marked “You are the master, and I am a lowly slave!” with her index finger. Sooner or later, you’ll be able to use them everywhere. “That’s just how they do things.” He must have yelled it maybe a hundred times. She immediately prostrates herself by shouting a — oh, wait. Don’t let the hype fool you: Japanese arcades are great because, you know, video games, though man, there is a hell of a lot of smoking going on in those places, man. As long as the boss sees him going and getting at the party, this guy is not going to lose his job anytime soon. . High school students will do it to celebrate their anticipation of successful performance on, like, college entrance exams. Maybe, if we know that so much of us will remain behind for other generations to inspect, we’ll try being better people. Or try going to the party and not drinking. Before that, I want to say that all of the Japanese people I know who know of Kotaku.com and are also not complete and total game freaks seem to be under the impression that Kotaku.com is a “website about Japanese culture.” Maybe that’s interesting. In Japan, gamers are smokers. Well, what about the people who, like me, simply find the smoke terrible? That’s why they have smoking sections at restaurants. You know, because these guys put in soul-crushing work hours and could probably use the encouragement from the company. Tofu is a food that requires so many nearly-dehumanizing labor processes to prepare. Classic video games from the 1990s: Goemon 2 is the shit, dude. Potato chips pretty much always have beef or pork extract in them. I read several weekly Japanese business magazines, and I once read one where a columnist reported some figures from some Japanese PhD’s recent research findings: Apparently, “putting on the impression of being busy” is mathematically proven to be “more important” for making money than either “offering good products” or “offering good service”. Most of the time, they put it on sideways, instead of vertically — you know, the way that would prevent the barcode from being scanned by a rogue scanner. This exquisite, extravagant, repeated conversational miscarriage occurs ever nano-second somewhere in this megalopolis. The film industry figures all they have to do is spend one yen more than their last mathematical success, and the world can keep on turning. Maybe if I moved out to Osaka, things would be better. Brain Training is a tool to keep your mind active. My favorite example is The Chokokuro Cafe. Once, shortly after getting a new job, a coworker announced he was getting up to smoke a cigarette. You need some outside influence, I said. I’m not the kind of person to say that everybody should want to rule the world. Only — I think — the producers and marketers of games in Japan are particularly out of touch with their fan-base. They probably think I came over here on a mission to fornicate, or something. Long ago, manga aspired to be like Dragon Ball Z : graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be. Many of the words used perfunctorily in the Japanese language have both useful purposes and cold, hard semantic meanings. Something else, however, has. You know, I don’t really mind, myself , though you really do have to say good morning. My neighbor, once, smoked in his apartment, sitting by the window. It tasted like a chocolate croissant. You have to play by the rules. They asked to have their little logo put on the menu standing outside the ramen shops, so the few vegetarians would know this place was safe. I once saw a video on YouTube of the game Infinite Undiscovery , in which the hero said “Cutitout!” every time he got hit. Someone in this group of juniors influenced them all to get into this circle. You see a lot of young couples with their toddlers, at restaurants, in the smoking section. That’s how I found it. They graduate and immediately find an excuse to wear a suit, even to companies with no dress code, so that everyone on the train might know where they stand in their life. iTunes can’t even get a break over here: When you can rent an entire CD for $4 and then rip it, why buy the songs for $2 each? Of course, the bands I like typically don’t have their CDs available for rent at the major chains. You can set up a budget plan and it’ll tell you how much money you should spend per day. Anyway, this ramen shop caught the attention of some society of Japanese vegetarians. “Given a thirty-second slot in a revolving door of comedy duos at some little club, how would you challenge the rules of the comedy duo format?” I asked this guy, this one night, at this dinner-thing. Two blocks down, the street I live on runs into a highway. It made me think: You know, in Japan, the guy at the 7-eleven nearest to my house literally does say ” Irasshaimase ” in the exact same tone of voice every time a customer enters the store. I had never played it until just last year, actually. Some part-time kid fresh out of college sat there with a notebook, writing down literally everything everyone said. Will Japan evolve because of this, or will it only continue its deepening spiral into the realm of my disinterest? Thanks to several recent developments in my life, I’ve realized that life is really just a game, and that I’m so dissatisfied with games (like Final Fantasy XIII ) lately, because I am approaching them as games within a game. I suppose that somewhat unceremoniously brings us to what might be the main point of all this: I DON’T LIKE PACHINKO I don’t like pachinko. The old people feel like the young people are giving up. I can’t possibly be the only person who is creeped out by this stuff: There is a whole verb in Japanese which, when appended to the stem form of any other verb, allows you to express the opposite of that verb without having to use its negative form. They had a big sign out front: “We’ve moved everything in the store! Come in and take a look!” Uh, okay. Even if it’s just me in the office when you get in, you should try getting into the habit of saying good morning in my presence. suspicious. As if having four Starbuckses on one city block wasn’t bad enough, you now had to deal with literally four Starbuckses and then one of each of two dozen other franchise Starbucks clones. Here is the part of the story where someone in the audience interjects, “Mmm! Delicious grease bubbles!” Save it, asshole! Let me finish: I don’t eat meat because I don’t like things like grease bubbles. Now, everyone has an iPod. Well, eventually, they made a croissant with a little bit of chocolate in it. What I’ve realized, recently, is that the skeleton of rules of the “game” of “life” is just too visible here in Japan, where multiple perfunctory sentences are required to start any conversation, where you can use a certain positive verb to soften the preconceived impact of a negative verb form, where you can prove mathematically that you are a good person by drinking alongside everyone else, by being the last to go home every day, by ritualistically screaming in the middle of the street after a company party. I was going to say something along the same lines, though probably with a lot more words. At first, they support it monetarily with some unease; sooner or later, their unease has given way to high-pitched laughter, as a private joke builds into an industry in itself. Later, it was MDs, then CD-Rs. When you reach the goal, you have earned the right to play a game with much simpler rules. “Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?” I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: “If we’re the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream ‘Good Morning’ and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?” Her answer was immediate, and humorless: “Yes.” “Well, I mean, there’s no one else around to hear it, right?” “You still have to do it. You then receive a microchipped card that will allow you to purchase cigarettes from vending machines. . 2. I checked the ingredients: It definitely had crab in it. Fact: I have never seen anyone playing Tekken 6 without also smoking a cigarette. (used to express a greeting, answer a telephone, or attract attention.) There you have it. Still, something caught my eye while looking over the white bread ingredient labels one day two or three years ago (sometimes I’m hanging out in a convenience store, waiting for a friend to make a purchase, and I just need to pick up and gently squeeze something soft): About half of the makers of white bread include lard as an ingredient. You can hardly understand what it is, even if you fluently understand the language. I feel a transient pride, typing this, that my own native language is less conducive to such robot-like precision. This is a thing that I know happens in white bread in other countries. I’ve heard maybe six dozen variations of this story from friends who work in hyper-large corporations: Some poor guy, during the Mandatory Daily Morning Gather And Scream in the middle of the office (or, in some cases, the large conference room downstairs), passes out, has a heart attack, an asthma attack, an aneurysm, whatever. Men in Japan nearly all transit through a phase, in their early twenties, where their favorite hobby is dressing up in their best clothes, standing in the middle of a crowded street with their best mates, and yelling single words at every reasonably attractive girl who walks by. You know, cardboard, up against concrete, is not only not uncomfortable — it’s pretty good for your spine! I pushed further: “What if I am the second person in the office, and the first person is someone with whom I have, previously, managed to successfully cultivate a congenial personal relationship? What if it’s a person whose first and last name I know, with whom I share interests and hobbies, and we’ve previously agreed that we think this ‘Good morning’ shit is some serious bullshit, and we just agree to be like, ‘Hey, what’s up’ to one another in the morning and we’ve also agreed that hey, if anyone else asks , we’ll just go ahead and say ‘Oh yeah, that dude totally screamed “Good morning” to me this morning’?” The HR girl didn’t even blink: “You still have to carry out the customary ‘Good Morning.’” How this relates to videogames : That company I talk about in the above paragraphs? They were a (pretty big) Japanese game company. So, wait, if everyone knows that the people aren’t saying actual words, why don’t they, like, get pissed about it? I mean, that’s some serious “The Matrix” bullshit right there. friend his band on myspace , follow him on twitter , or email him at 108 (at) action button (dot! (net!)) Japan Mt. I’ll die.” Repeat 20 to 25 times, until, eventually, the other guy goes, “Oh, wait, you’re serious?” Maybe if I were a Japanese person, and I said this, they wouldn’t be attempting to detect irony, and it would go more smoothly. I was looking at jeans, and an employee, standing nearby, was repeatedly yelling ” Irrashaimase ” at my roommate and I. FG: Oh, if you say so— SG: You really ARE fat, though! FG: Heyyyyyyy!! Sudden stop. So, one day, we got an email: “THIS FRIDAY AT SIX PM, EVERY EMPLOYEE IS REQUIRED TO REPORT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM TO EAT PIZZA”. I know what’s meat and what’s not meat.” We ended with a little “agree to disagree” thing. So hostess clubs proliferated. Our game only has, what, four? We need to step it up!” And you say, “Well, Halo 3 was made by a team of like six hundred people. I keep my TV off religiously. Last year, a half-dozen shops in the covered shopping street between my house and JR Koenji Station shut down all at once. In college, people are confused, because they don’t have uniforms. This really works in Japanese, because every syllable ends with a vowel, making it friendly to exclamations. The “rules” of working adult society so very mathematically dictate that 1. Occasionally, I’ll be out eating dinner with friends, and young people at a nearby table will be talking about opening a business. Try sitting at the window on the second floor of the Starbucks at Hachiko crossing on a rainy day. “Natural” means we are born with penises and vaginas and what-have-you. . WEIRD RESERVATION RULES I wanted to write a story for Kotaku.com (this website right here) about what it was like to go visit the Dragon Quest IX -themed “Luida’s Bar” in Roppongi. “Take just one drink!” “I’m allergic.” “Oh, no you’re not! Just take one drink!” “I’m allergic. ] Then, I saw this presentation from this year’s DICE conference. Though man, in Tokyo, you can use them for so much: vending machines, supermarkets, whatever. I used to think old men grunted at me on the train because they didn’t like foreigners. :-/ THE “DRINK TICKET” SYSTEM When you go see a live musical performance, the venues always force you to pay at least 500 yen for a “drink ticket.” They do this even if you’re on the guest list! It’s weird. It’s nothing an iPhone application couldn’t do, though it was monstrously popular. They only receive phone calls, once a month, with bank transfer information. Popular music from the 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s Now onto the complaints: ANIME SUCKS When foreign cultures talk about Japan, they usually talk about anime and / or manga. Or, no, this is better — the Japanese entertainment industry is like what would happen if ABC, NBC, and CBS announced that they were replacing the hosts of all of their late-night talk shows with Regis Philbin, starting immediately. In Tokyo, when consumers start thinking really hard , they end up spending more money: In the case of the Dragon Quest bar, that means they would buy more drinks. How this relates to games : So you have all these little niches, right? How many of them, really, need to exist? You have people sitting around in planning rooms going, “How are we going to get more money?” “Whose money are we going to get next?” It’s fairly simple why they want this money. You must smoke. As brick-and-mortar game stores, for example disappear, as everyone starts ordering all their clothing online, will this turn completely into a city of pachinko parlors and love hotels? Math, and fucking , as it were? Is that what it is? Two people have sex; ninety years later, you’re breathing nicotine and just trying to spend everything as effortlessly as possible before you die. In China, meat is associated with wealth and success. Eventually, a guy just barely outgrows the “Big Brother” personality type, and suddenly becomes like everyone in the room’s uncle. Would you like something with some substance?” The man thought for a second: “Bacon!” “Okay”, said the waitress, and hurried away. Eventually, someone higher up in the administration of the parent company was running down a checklist of things they could do to make more money. If you say it like that, it comes out as sensationalist and weird. This is the non-Vegas equivalent of playing the nickel slots: The odds are fucking hell of slim, though who knows? You could strike a jackpot (“get laid”). I think, in general, the Japanese seem to be comfortable stereotyping and being stereotyped. Well, let’s see. People really loved their Extra Pork Bone Marrow ramen! The number of locations multiplied. Well, sometimes, Japanese companies don’t even start with that much vision. It grows as you save money on gas. Eventually, this escalates to a point where either someone gets punched in the throat or kicked in the nuts, or someone just goes home and drinks himself to a dreamless sleep and a morning hangover. Sooner or later, everyone is going to be connected on a service that tracks everything, Unlocking Achievements in all forms of art and entertainment, every game they play or book they read logged meticulously for future generations to see. They just had a couple of cafes in Tokyo. I should just write off a few of my frustrations as quickly as possible, or else we’ll be here all day tomorrow as well: EVERYTHING MOVES Every damn store I ever go to always moves every single item from one side of the store to the other every three months. . Also, it’s worth noting that certain other expressions, ejaculations, and exclamations in the Japanese language are also full words. Maybe that description didn’t make much sense. Or maybe they’re expected to eat so much that they get tired. Sony, back then, were requiring all employees in the Computer Entertainment division to fill out a Game Design Idea Submission form every single day. Though you know what, if I’m going to choose my place to live based entirely on how little I mind the surrounding people, or if I’m going to live somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with people at all ,it might as well be somewhere I wouldn’t have to pay quite as much for vegetarian recipe ingredients. The magazine publishers and content providers are such a close-knit group that they silently agree to say only positive things. Why not try avoiding the situations where you’d normally have to apologize? I once worked at a company where “I’m deeply sorry for not picking up the phone sooner!” was the required telephone greeting. If you’re not part of the team, it’s possible you’re not actually working at the company. Panzer Dragoon Zwei is totally the shit, too. Years later, I was dating a woman who might have really hated me. I mean, that was all he did. The weird thing is, he’s not even trying to lift the weight. I’m sure if they developed easy retinal scan technology, the Japanese would slap a cute-looking eyeball mascot on the advertisements and people would be lined up to volunteer their information for the system. The suggestion that non-vegetarians might be put-off by the inclusion of the vegetarian magazine’s seal of approval was immediately heeded. It’s not me so much as it’s all people younger than 80. I’m also sure that it’s a good idea to address the unavoidable comment that I sound like a person who wouldn’t be happy anywhere: Maybe this is true. It used to be you could just use them to ride the train. I know some people have some great conversations in Japan, usually with the TV off, though hanging out with those people didn’t earn me financial stability, much less the right to continue to live in this country, so I had to stick with the people who need the TV to know how to react to a delicious meal. The waitress looked over the little notepad in her hands. I’m told, sometimes, that at such functions at the Mandatory Cherry Blossom-Viewing Party every company holds every year in the nearest large park, if you just relax and enjoy yourself, it’s not so bad, and sometimes it’s not bad at all. Sometimes, I stand and watch them as they continue to chant for literally a half an hour at a time. It scared the shit out of me. . Or maybe it’s just me. You must be hearing things. Weird. He gets on the chest press machine, puts it down on the lowest weight — five kilograms — puts his hands on the handlebars, and screeeeeeams like he’s taking a dump on a planet of extreme gravity. The general consensus is that, if a guy doesn’t want to go to a party and get terribly drunk with everyone else in the company, then he obviously has some element of his outside life — a girlfriend, a hobby, et cetera — that is more important to him than the company, so any work he does is less worthy of trust than any work done by anyone who “respects the company” enough to go to all the parties and match the boss drink for drink. Trains: Do I ever love riding Japanese trains — while playing Dragon Quest on DS, and drinking delicious Coca-Cola Zero. Maybe it was popular because it was so well-designed. In a voice just above a casual conversation, he counts his “reps” — from “one” to well past a thousand. If the bar isn’t 60 feet underground (they usually are), someone whips out that phone, looks up “alcohol allergy,” and says “Oh, all that’ll happen is you’ll break out in some hives.” “It’s just hives, man.” Then I inevitably get someone leaning over and whispering to me, “Hives are not so bad. The police won’t touch the advertisements, because the situation sounds like the yakuza are involved. You’re not Japanese . Anyway, I brought up the ” irasshaimase ” thing, and she groaned. Game rental generally doesn’t happen. Recently, some retailer in, uhh, New Zealand, was it? They said they refused to carry the PSPGo. My problem is that ” irasshaimase ” actually means something in both ancient and modern Japanese. We are not born with a natural inclination to, you know, need to dress in gaudy clothes, tell men up-front that sex is an impossibility because of contract stipulations, and then proceed to take their money in exchange for the service of acting surprised whenever they mention how tired they are from work. They were supposed to force the about-to-die person to take a good look at themselves, and give up on giving up. What things, though? Well, maybe the people wouldn’t bother me so much. I’ve talked about hostess clubs at length in a previous column (“can videogames be our friends?”). Oxen can pull plows, et cetera. Hell, maybe I’m on the verge of becoming desensitized to it right now . What’s going to happen, then? Businesses like Chokokuro Cafe are nonchalantly dumping tiny little rabbit turds into the ocean-sized reservoir of the world economy. SO MANY PEOPLE SMOKE I don’t like people when they’re smoking. TEMPLATE CONVERSATIONS CREEP ME OUT I swear, at every party I’ve ever been to in Japan, this exact conversation has occurred, word for word: “Ahh! Beer!” “This beer is delicious!” “Yes! This beer is delicious!” “There’s nothing quite so delicious as a cold beer after a hard day of work!” You know those trees in “Lord of the Rings”, where they have to sit in a circle for an hour making low sounds just to say “hello” to one another? That’s what this is like. This is a subtle hint: Their lives, bodies, and souls belong to the company; the energy that resides in those bodies is all to the company’s benefit. I do not use the word “indecipherable” lightly. What’s weird is when you play a video game translated from Japanese into English, and the translators are “thorough” enough to translate these actual-word ejaculations into actual words of English. The volume is so atrociously high that it reaches even as far as my bedroom, late at night. So the ultimate reward for playing pachinko is money. Anime used to answer the questions of kids’ dreams: ” How awesome would it be to be a world-class assassin / kung-fu master / robot pilot / baseball hero?” Now it’s just a bunch of shit pandering to perverts and pedophiles. The initial reaction was, “That’s what the game designers do!” It took days of near-futile conversation to uncover the controversial finding that, prior to designing a game for the first time, people like Shigeru Miyamoto had actually never designed any games. Sure, any guy can have sex with a girl who works in a hostess club that the guy has never been to. The word “Come [into the store / over here]” is not genuine. Now there’s the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z -inspired One Piece , a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one. Maybe I’m just in the wrong country for over-thinking. Certain times of the year roll around, and you can’t navigate a well-populated street without encountering a large group of screaming, chanting businesspeople. Do you seriously expect me to get lost on my way to find DVD-Rs and suddenly go, “Oh man, I should get this MacBook Pro — and this 57-inch LED HDTV”? At one office where I worked for a while, they actually hired a guy from an efficiency expert firm to sit in the office for a week and analyze where the staff should sit. Actually, my most recent physical indicates this might just be a quarter -life crisis (I am somewhat unfortunately a paragon of health).

Every once in a while, Starbucks came up with something new. On the other side of the highway, visible from my living room window, stands a large pachinko parlor. I’m pretty sure the “Minority Report” future will emerge well before I’m old enough to play pachinko. Maybe this impression is born from the fact that breathing in Japanese arcades is pretty much exactly like dunking your head in a bucket of hot water and dead cigarettes. Actually, let’s get the THINGS I LOVE ABOUT JAPAN out of the way, first. . Or try going to the party and not drinking. Eventually, they turned into gambling devices. Hostesses in hostess clubs do not have sex with the customers. Well, there you go. If you want to go see a no-name band play at a bedroom-sized bar, it’s going to cost you around $40. Maybe I’m just in the wrong country for over-thinking. It has bacon in it.” “You don’t like bacon?” “It’s meat.” “No it’s not!” The man was being deadly, gravely serious. If Paris Hilton were Japanese, they’d literally have her anchoring the fucking national news. Masturbation is a taboo topic, so, no.” Here I could talk about how EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING , and how you really need to only know maybe six words — one of them ” wasurenai ” (“[I / he / she / it] [will not / does not] forget”) to get the basic idea of what they’re always saying. Every single time I would order the pasta, the waitress would utter, in the same practiced tone: “I’m sorry — it doesn’t have very much stuff in it”. So, it used to be, the ultimate Achievement Unlocked was to pick up a girl who is bound by the rules of her society to not converse casually with you. It grows as you save money on gas. It’s a pretty simple kind of pasta — just oil, garlic, and peppers. That’s the busiest pedestrian crossing — and the busiest Starbucks — in the world. This is the non-Vegas equivalent of playing the nickel slots: The odds are fucking hell of slim, though who knows? You could strike a jackpot (“get laid”). Then there’s the really old guy who gets the lightest possible resistance band, wraps it around the side of the squat rack, through the Smith press, and over the bench press, effectively commandeering half of the free weight area; he holds it in place, and screams. “What I mean is, what kind of comedy is it that you really would ‘love’ to do? Give me a for example.” “It’s . Sometimes, they love it! Sometimes, they get severe brain damage, too. Of course, it’s all a front. It’s terrifying to see so many dozens of seventy-something man, drunk, on a train, in a suit, on the way home at midnight on a Wednesday. New CDs from popular average around $40 each. Chances are, if you’ve only spent a short time in Japan, you might have found it endearing. Even if it’s just me in the office when you get in, you should try getting into the habit of saying good morning in my presence. He asked if I wanted to join him. Or how a coincidentally meat-free soup stock once changed their label to proudly advertise “Now tastes more like crab!” It had never tasted anything like crab. The “product description” reads like a bullet-pointed list from one of the Japanese game industry’s beloved PowerPoint presentations, which got sent to Amazon administrators on mistake. Producers taking a niche and encouraging it — like, say, we have maids, right? Maids creep me the hell out. We can live on it, though if we’re making it ourselves, it’s something we have to devote our lives to. The vegetarian people featured the ramen shop in a magazine. People really loved their Extra Pork Bone Marrow ramen! The number of locations multiplied. Actually, my most recent physical indicates this might just be a quarter -life crisis (I am somewhat unfortunately a paragon of health). Popular music from the 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s Now onto the complaints: ANIME SUCKS When foreign cultures talk about Japan, they usually talk about anime and / or manga. A friend claims that his friend actually quit smoking when the Japanese rolled out a new mandatory cigarette vending machine ID proxy card called “Taspo”: to get a Taspo, you have to go through this process of proving your age, supplying a photo, et cetera. This is a subtle hint: Their lives, bodies, and souls belong to the company; the energy that resides in those bodies is all to the company’s benefit. I’ll try to start with small things and work my way up to big things. . . I don’t like this form of comedy. Fat Guy: We’re very glad to be here. Sometimes, I stand and watch them as they continue to chant for literally a half an hour at a time. By “trying”, I mean they’re putting up signs everywhere that say you’ll be fined 2,000 yen if you smoke. They never have a reason for doing this. You know, I don’t really mind, myself , though you really do have to say good morning. Maybe, if we know that so much of us will remain behind for other generations to inspect, we’ll try being better people. I would know; I’ve tried it. What the hell is that about? The answer is: nothing. I had never played it until just last year, actually. . People who have fun are good employees 4. Above, I mentioned how girls (and dudes) working in normal cafes, or any kind of restaurant, immediately place themselves a level lower than you, using very ancient, stilted words. He was surprised. The Saint Marc corporation was founded in 1989 by a couple of young people who didn’t know they wanted to have a cafe. You’d figure something would compute in the smoker’s brain, when they hold their burning cigarette as far away from their own face as possible — at toddler-eyeball-burning height — that maybe, just maybe, the smoke coming out of their cigarette tip might bother other people as much as it actually bothers them. I look at these people, and I think, where in the hell are we going? A friend in real estate once told me that no building ever turned into a pachinko parlor or a love hotel will ever see life as anything else. They asked to have their little logo put on the menu standing outside the ramen shops, so the few vegetarians would know this place was safe. A friend let me in on this secret. Approximately 60 million people live within an hour’s commute of Central Tokyo 3. Anime heroes used to be people with amazing job descriptions; now they’re reasonably young men who find themselves miraculously sharing houses with a dozen girls aged six to nine, accidentally almost touching every other scene. Every rental joint knows exactly what’s up: Back in the 80s, they sold blank cassette tapes. What’s weird is when you play a video game translated from Japanese into English, and the translators are “thorough” enough to translate these actual-word ejaculations into actual words of English. Fact: I have never seen anyone playing Tekken 6 without also smoking a cigarette. In Japan, they’ve had these microchip-equipped cards for a decade. This atmosphere is completely manufactured. “I thought you said you were in a band?” Just like that: You’re in a band. That’s why the city is so clean — the people carry their garbage everywhere. THE PASSIVE AGGRESSION It’s hard to find a garbage can in Tokyo. Delicious, garlic-based vegetarian-friendly ramen, however, was exclusive only to a few ramen shops in Tokyo. The word means, more or less, “You are tired!” The progression goes like this: When you see someone in the office before noon, you are to tell them “good morning.” After lunch has finished, leading right up to the end of the day, it’s “You are tired!” So there you have it: Japanese people in the office are expected to work themselves to tiredness before lunch. They’re standing a circle, completely of their own accord. I once pointed out, to a police officer, that someone was smoking in the no-smoking zone, and asked if he would fine him, and the cop simply asked me for my ID, passport, and visa papers. Now there’s the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z -inspired One Piece , a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one. They called it the “Chocolate Croissant.” What a name! I’m not really sure how this happened, though it got popular. Movie tickets are as expensive as they are because 1. What this has to do with videogames : When you buy Super Famicom games in used game shops, the gray plastic is very often stained deep, ugly yellow from existing in houses packed to bursting with cigarette smoke. “Take just one drink!” “I’m allergic.” “Oh, no you’re not! Just take one drink!” “I’m allergic. Why not try avoiding the situations where you’d normally have to apologize? I once worked at a company where “I’m deeply sorry for not picking up the phone sooner!” was the required telephone greeting. SG: We hope you will enjoy being entertained by us, and my apologies in advance: my partner is kind of fat. I mentioned in my last column that trends only move forward into the mainstream because someone in marketing decides what the next big thing is going to be. “I can’t eat this. Recently, some retailer in, uhh, New Zealand, was it? They said they refused to carry the PSPGo. I suppose the number of smokers actually has gone down in the past years, since I’ve been here. . I would like to say that I intend to flesh out each of the following bullet points in such a way as to minimize hate mail, though that would be undermining the creativity of hate mailers. Well, eventually, they made a croissant with a little bit of chocolate in it. His precision is hardly creepy. Here’s what I think of these words: They exist to cut the bullshit out of life. They don’t. He looked them over, gave them back, and turned away. In Japan, gamers are smokers. With the service industry so twisted to a point where “chatting up a shop girl” is literally considered by men-about-town to be the hardest form of pick-up, how do Japanese people make friends? The answer seems to be that, in any sense other than meeting people through school, work, or companies related to their company, they don’t. Sony, back then, were requiring all employees in the Computer Entertainment division to fill out a Game Design Idea Submission form every single day. It’s like seeing a cockroach scatter from behind the TV and up into a crack in the ceiling just before you shut off the light to go to bed in a seedy motel: now you have to sleep with that knowledge. We were coached in orientation to use a neighbor’s phone to call our own desk phone to learn the exact length of one ring, so that we could practice the timing of picking up the phone partway through its first ring — not soon enough to freak out the person on the other end. Sometimes, the consoles themselves are so yellow. A big tarp went up where the shops used to be. Still, something caught my eye while looking over the white bread ingredient labels one day two or three years ago (sometimes I’m hanging out in a convenience store, waiting for a friend to make a purchase, and I just need to pick up and gently squeeze something soft): About half of the makers of white bread include lard as an ingredient. You know how football players get into a huddle before a game, bump fists and yell “GOOOOOO TEAM”? It’s like that, only they’re doing it after successfully Achievement Unlocked: The Drunkening. They do this so you can prove that you paid for the drink, should you roll into another convenient store glugging away. Chokokuro Cafe has a smoking section, separated from the non-smoking section by a maybe-four-foot-tall wall of plastic. We argued about it in the politest tones possible for maybe three minutes. Moving everything in a major electronics retail store, however, just feels tacky. The guy just kept yelling it in the exact same tone of voice every time he got hit. There’s a lot of brain-hacking going on in there. Maybe I can sum up every little point I’m trying to make in this whole word-slab by saying I don’t like that so many people agree to do things that they obviously hate doing. Do you seriously expect me to get lost on my way to find DVD-Rs and suddenly go, “Oh man, I should get this MacBook Pro — and this 57-inch LED HDTV”? At one office where I worked for a while, they actually hired a guy from an efficiency expert firm to sit in the office for a week and analyze where the staff should sit. That’s a machine there’s got to be somebody raging against. So the people of my town live in fear and annoyance. It’s the rule. The word “Come [into the store / over here]” is not genuine. In addition to being a metaphor for the en-masse bottling-up of passive aggression in Tokyo, it’s also the truth. His closing argument, in the Japanese tradition, was the same as mine, only with one of the words in the first sentence changed: “Look, man, I do eat meat. SHIT BE EXPENSIVE UP IN HERE To exist in Tokyo is to stand in a packed rush-hour train with your nose pressed against hard against the back of the head of the black hole named “Supply And Demand.” It costs like $25 to see a movie. You can’t. Panzer Dragoon Zwei is totally the shit, too. Probably millions of people come to not like anyplace they can call “here.” There’s a chance that I’m overreacting and/or having some mid-life crisis. My excuse that I was just the vocalist, so I needed to keep my throat pure. Her explanation weird despite its terseness: “This is how adults interact in Japan.” Most of the people at the orientation, like me, were under twenty-five. The film industry figures all they have to do is spend one yen more than their last mathematical success, and the world can keep on turning. Now it’s a niche. As usual, I’m probably over-thinking this. I said I didn’t smoke. The majority of Japanese comedians are people who stand on a stage reciting one catch phrase over and over again. It made me think: You know, in Japan, the guy at the 7-eleven nearest to my house literally does say ” Irasshaimase ” in the exact same tone of voice every time a customer enters the store. According to friends who regularly eat “normal” ramen, the vegetarian ramen was unique and delicious. Well, let’s see. I can’t possibly be the only person who is creeped out by this stuff: There is a whole verb in Japanese which, when appended to the stem form of any other verb, allows you to express the opposite of that verb without having to use its negative form. Now, I don’t. “Given a thirty-second slot in a revolving door of comedy duos at some little club, how would you challenge the rules of the comedy duo format?” I asked this guy, this one night, at this dinner-thing. (Mostly.) Might these things have some connection? If this is the direction things are headed, then the games of the future are going to be fuckin’ scary . It’s nothing an iPhone application couldn’t do, though it was monstrously popular. Both: Goodnight everybody! And that was it. Anyway, last night I was drinking beer—wait, are you SURE you didn’t call me fat? SG: Oh no, I certainly did not. Dragon-Quest -themed bars in Roppongi aren’t the only places to do this. In addition to possibly cutting minors off of Japan’s abundant supply of cigarettes, it also makes you, the adult, literally a card-carrying member of a club called “smokers.” My friend claimed his friend was only a casual smoker, and didn’t feel like taking the necessary leap of bureaucracy to join the Smokers’ Club. So you might go in there just to get milk, and end up getting a bunch of stuff you didn’t know you wanted. It tasted like a chocolate croissant. Anyway, this ramen shop caught the attention of some society of Japanese vegetarians. They probably think I came over here on a mission to fornicate, or something. Maybe that description didn’t make much sense. What are these old people in these pachinko parlors doing? The generation gap between these people and my grandmother — between cruises around the world and zombification within a pachinko parlor — is only a decade and a half, at the most. In the days of dating simulations and of actual slot machines and lottery tickets that could produce a jackpot from a minimal investment, in a society of pedestrians whose every waking moment is some form of game, shackles made of words with meanings that don’t always add up to their practical use contribute to the bottling up of what I believe to be some pretty fuckin’ weird shit, man. Well. Two blocks down, the street I live on runs into a highway. I suppose that somewhat unceremoniously brings us to what might be the main point of all this: I DON’T LIKE PACHINKO I don’t like pachinko. To encourage people to drink, they literally force you to purchase a “ticket” for a drink prior to entering the club. A tenuous video-game connection I can think of off the top of my head is when Eiji Aonuma told an interviewer that Zelda fans are so faithful because puzzles in Zelda games make the player “feel smart.” On the one hand, maybe making consumers feel smart, or at least thoughtful, makes them end up spending more money somewhere down the line. Anyway, they consulted the same firm every other month. They’d be out of work. If you want to like music over here, you need to be willing to surrender all of your disposable income. And though Famitsu ’s reviews consist of four viewpoints, the fans are prone to more or less always consider the score as a total out of forty rather than four scores on a scale of one to ten. If you don’t go to a company party, you’re not part of the team. It doesn’t even move. You can hardly understand what it is, even if you fluently understand the language. You might have heard that the Japanese work insanely hard, or that some people die from overwork. The “rules” of working adult society so very mathematically dictate that 1. They could just not have coffee at all. You might say I could ignore comedy by turning the TV off — not so. The weird thing is, he’s not even trying to lift the weight. I suppose the intended audience is dudes who think this sort of thing is hilarious, though what’s the possibility that those games exist so that girls can aspire to be hostesses, and consider the game some kind of primer for their future lifestyle? Where are we headed, then? The producers might be the type of people to think, “Yeah, the hostess club industry exist because of some weird multi-layered passive aggressive need cooked in the crucible of Japanese semantics for centuries, and there’s probably a better role-model for girls, though some girls want to be hostesses already, and it’s more profitable to not try to change their mind.” I realize I sound like one of those conservatives saying they shouldn’t hand out condoms in high school, though man, like George Michael said, “Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it — everybody should “. To be most blunt, modern Japanese games are so soulless because the only people who make them are people who make games. JAPANESE MOVIES SUCK Okay, “Ponyo” was one of the best films I’ve ever seen in my life , though for the most part modern Japanese films kind of blow. I look inside, at all the old people. I don’t like that people are allowed to smoke in my favorite little organic vegetable cafe, right there on the floor with the open kitchen. BONUS ROUND: At least you get the opportunity to apologize to the boss. (Recall Indiana Jones in “The Temple of Doom” — “Hindus don’t eat meat! Something’s wrong here.”) Or how the Japanese variety of Bac-Os bacon(-flavored) bits, which are completely vegan-friendly in America, list “Pork Extract” as the top ingredient, even though — according to a foreign friend brave enough to eat them regularly — they smell and taste exactly like American Bac-Os. Okay: What if they made a Lucky Charms that was all marshmallows? Japanese games, thanks to Chokokuro-like thinking, are now like ramen with more noodles and less soup, because people like the noodles more, and lots of jerks manage to finish the noodles without finishing the soup. . They were known for an edgier decor than your old-school Japanese cafes, or than Starbucks’s down-home feel. SO MANY PEOPLE SMOKE I don’t like people when they’re smoking. “That’s just how they do things.” He must have yelled it maybe a hundred times. I researched this topic a couple years back, and one of the recurring theories was that game publishers know that used shops exist, and they wouldn’t like to cannibalize their businesses by ultimately producing fewer used games. suspicious. Rather, I’ll blame it and all the things like it. He was really popular for a while. That’s a little weird. This is why Weekly Famitsu — a game magazine — is noteworthy. Every other game is one of two scenarios: 1. Japan is land of the abundant “Famous For Being Famous” class of entertainers. A perfect example is the Amazon.co.jp page for Sega and tri-Ace’s RPG End of Eternity . Oxen can pull plows, et cetera. The milk is always in the refrigerated section, in the back of the store. The Japanese have distilled “social life” to a point where it is literally a part of work. You’re not Japanese . “Natural” means we are born with penises and vaginas and what-have-you. You really came to feel like you were in Asia, what with people screaming everywhere, like they would in an epic Chinese marketplace scene in an adventure film. Game rental generally doesn’t happen. That’s the half I eat. I will not embellish my translation: “Graphics are very pretty: the game is on a high-end console.” “Innovative RPG battle system: different from other RPG battle systems.” Here’s the one that actually scared me of the whole world for a couple of minutes: “Feels like a game: is easy to play, and features level design that will not stress the player .” I feel like I’ve seen into a confidential document, here. I tend to avoid white bread on principle, eating only whole wheat bread. I have a “problem” stepping completely away from reality. Tofu is a food that requires so many nearly-dehumanizing labor processes to prepare. Fuji PIC [Flickr] Smoking PIC [Flickr] Bacon Sushi PIC [Flickr]. Eventually, I went there one day, and the pasta had shredded octopus tentacles and bacon in it. The one thing we all have in common is that we sometimes ride the train during nighttime rush hour, and we’re not wearing suits. The most common TV show is a genreless, formless, gelatinous entertainment blog in which the Famous For Being Famous sit around a table and view video clips. Instead, I’ll just say that, yes, I live in Tokyo and I have for many years, and that I do understand that many of the complaints here are maybe particular to Tokyo. THE COPYCATS, THE UP-GIVERS It is my opinion that Japanese businesses generally suck at marketing. The samurai used to, like, ritualistically scream, kneel, and cut their intestines out with their sword if they were disgraced in battle. I was dating the woman who might have sincerely hated me around the time this happened, because she mentioned having heard about it, and wanting to eat it. Not long after this happened, the chain coincidentally took off. I’ve heard maybe six dozen variations of this story from friends who work in hyper-large corporations: Some poor guy, during the Mandatory Daily Morning Gather And Scream in the middle of the office (or, in some cases, the large conference room downstairs), passes out, has a heart attack, an asthma attack, an aneurysm, whatever. Starbuckses the world over are smoke-free. The tension is building. As far as game design goes, it’s not that incredible, because the video clips on the display screen really have absolutely nothing to do with anything aside from the animated series from which they’ve been extracted. You just might have not had the same semantic prison constructed around you by all the people subliminally intoning “You are tired!” to you every thirty fucking seconds. The volume is so atrociously high that it reaches even as far as my bedroom, late at night. Then you’re up to your ears in nickels (“in bed with a girl who probably disrespects you as much as you disrespect her”). Actually, we would have needed to make reservations more than twenty-four hours in advance: We could only reserve a spot between eight or nine PM on Wednesday between twelve and four on Tuesday. This exquisite, extravagant, repeated conversational miscarriage occurs ever nano-second somewhere in this megalopolis. Last year there was a movie version of the manga “20th Century Boys.” The poster showed all of the actors in the film, each of them positioned in poses that mirrored poses their characters had assumed in particular memorable panels in the manga. The experience spawned a lifetime of seeking out digital stress and triumphing over it. They take up all of the sidewalk. God, I can hardly stand to be in front of it. Sure. You know, in any country aside from Japan, 500 yen is about what you’d pay for cover at a dive bar. And that, basically, is what’s been on my mind the past five years. I don’t like how almost every restaurant has a smoking section, and you invariably have to go through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section. I’m not the kind of person to say that everybody should want to rule the world. Lots of people who I meet as tourists seem enamored with the idea when they first encounter it. Potato chips pretty much always have beef or pork extract in them. Weird. Sometimes, someone bumps into someone, purely by accident. Animal Crossing is more or less a game about communication, in which your only rewards come from doing good deeds. “Why is he telling us to come into the store if we’re already in the store?” “Beats me, man,” was my roommate’s response. They did. A month later, it was one huge pachinko parlor. Sure, any guy can have sex with a girl who works in a hostess club that the guy has never been to. They actually have some semblance of subjectivity in their weekly reviews section. Once, another foreign employee at another company suggested to the management that they try doing things like ordering pizza — or the Japanese equivalent — for the employees, every once in a while. Maybe the rage of this current moment is, in fact, a last-ditch effort to affect some change before I can’t care less anymore. Being serious about parties and requiring all employees to attend or it’s they ass is not nearly as bad as forcing an employee to disembowel himself as punishment for the feudal Japanese equivalent of jamming the paper shredder. That’s how they keep them coming. In Japan, the shame is even thinner. It shows you the shit out of how many hit points of damage you’re doing. Well, no one likes it after a while, least of all the people who are doing it. Another form of Japanese comedy involves two men standing on a stage simultaneously. The kid was calling it out repeatedly as he folded jeans a few aisles away from the jeans that interested me. SCREAMING IS THE MESSAGE I can’t have not mentioned this before: Employees at shops in Japan scream all the time, and sometimes with no reason. High school students wear uniforms. Hell, maybe I’m on the verge of becoming desensitized to it right now . Seeing as big business was the thing putting the Japanese all over the map, most kids around then had been studying business. An attendant would then cut the samurai’s head off with a sword. EVERYTHING IN JAPAN HAS MEAT IN IT Everything in Japan has meat in it. We parted ways both knowing that we were right, only, to this day, I still kind of have the edge, because I actually was right. THE EMOTION GESTAPO In an earlier column (” Stop Telling Me What To Do “), I talked about a system of loudspeakers set up in my neighborhood, blaring advertisements for local businesses. Years later, I was dating a woman who might have really hated me. FG: Oh, I’m sorry. Chatting up a shop-girl used to be the ultimate pick-up, and it was because of the difficulty of said pick-up that “talking to a girl who is involved in some capacity in the service industry” became a certifiable fetish. I’ve lived in Japan for a long time. That’s why we call it ‘protocol.’” This instant was actually the very first time I begin to ponder the logistics of actually going ahead and being homeless. I used to think old men grunted at me on the train because they didn’t like foreigners. “UMAI!” he yelled, before the heat of the boiling water could even vent out of his mouth. When there’s a party, he’ll be the guy who immediately grabs the menu, counts up the number of people at the table, asks for a show of hands, says “Who is NOT drinking beer?” He’ll bark to the waitress how many beers we need, and bring us some of this fried chicken cartilage and these potato things, and some edamame beans, and some salad, and some pickles, too. Some people are good enough at pachinko to not even need a job. At first, they support it monetarily with some unease; sooner or later, their unease has given way to high-pitched laughter, as a private joke builds into an industry in itself. They’re probably still at their desks, answering the phones, right about now, at four AM on Sunday, waiting for that day when they won’t be answering the phones anymore. Try sitting at the window on the second floor of the Starbucks at Hachiko crossing on a rainy day. Schell says we might read a new “Star Trek” book, and then be told we’ve just Unlocked the Achievement of having read 500 books, and we might feel dumb that this is our 500th book. They approached the old-fashioned microphones, stopped, bowed to the audience, and began: Skinny Guy: Hello everyone! Nice to meet you! We are [Dumb Name of Comedy Duo]. Anyway, they start chanting something. Good employees will never, ever get fired Maybe you know the story about how Gran Turismo got started because Kazunori Yamauchi, on his first day in the Sony Computer Entertainment offices, wrote out a sample game design idea consisting only of the words “I want to drive my car on my television.” What you may not know is that this is more or less the way many Japanese companies have been doing everything creative for maybe fifty years. I literally have to say “I’m allergic to alcohol” 40 times before they’ll stop pushing me to take a drink. She took cruises around the world. I have spent a large part of my life circling the globe, immersing myself in languages, and tolerating the hell out of some world cultures. You see a lot of young couples with their toddlers, at restaurants, in the smoking section. Say you enter a Starbucks and the girl behind the counter is hella hot. Experimental music: These guys know what they’re doing! 2. Well, five months later, I’ve never seen or heard of anyone getting fined. This group of maybe forty young men and women in suits are screaming in unison. Instead, rather than take what didn’t work all the time and try to make it actually work all the time, they took what did work, and left it all by itself. Huge, horse-choking, golden, gleaming five-digit numerals explode outward everywhere. It’s so huge, and loud, right there in the middle of my trendy street. Western business gurus have been advising young up-and-comers for years to put “President and Founder” on their business card instead of “First and Only Employee.” Well, Tokyo is a pedestrian culture, and on the ground, this advice translate into something terrifying. Why not treat them to, you know, one higher class of a food? The human resources department passed the idea around, and figured it couldn’t hurt. I’ve watched ingredient labels with perverse interest over the years. In a country so dense with rules and polite gestures, you’d figure less people would so flagrantly brandish cigarettes on the street. If you’re not part of the team, it’s possible you’re not actually working at the company. The game never shows you how many hit points the monsters have. It’s like, what if they made a Cap’n Crunch that was all Crunchberries? Oh wait. Well, sometimes, Japanese companies don’t even start with that much vision. However, if you translate this idea into English, it comes across as unforgivably stilted. Something else, however, has. Things could, of course, be worse. It took me a while to really catch on to what this is. Anime is terrible. PR is thoroughly integrated into every aspect of business that I’M ALMOST FINISHED I only have a few more things I want to say before I conclude this. These products were so successful that the certifiable geniuses at Nintendo considered, developed, released, and then reaped the benefits of such products as “My Finance Diary” and Tomodachi Collection . Okay, here’s one mostly related: In many Japanese offices, you’re required to scream “Good morning!” at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. It’s a little . The old people feel like the young people are giving up. They were supposed to force the about-to-die person to take a good look at themselves, and give up on giving up. Later, it was MDs, then CD-Rs. I think they just want to find an excuse to keep the employees after hours, screaming in a circle to psych themselves up for the act of moving shelves and stock. That’s why they call it real life! THE STEREOTYPING My gym refuses entry / membership to anyone with a tattoo. Don’t ask me to prove this, because it will extend this already bloated chunk of pseudo-prose by another six thousand words. So, why do they let so many clearly insane -looking octogenarians into the gym? We have one guy who looks like Mister Magoo. Like, they have this cell-phone game now where you raise a hostess like a virtual pet. This is just how we do things in Japan, Tim.” “Well, [Name-removed]- san , you can try putting ‘ san ‘ on the end of my fucking name from now on, then, you know, as practice.” Really — all these customs and politeness and whatever, and they go and throw out the customary name suffix and just call me “Tim”. Maybe all three of these things are part of the same problem. Also, whenever there’s a popular book in Japan, they’ll make both a movie and a TV series out of it at the same time. It plays video clips which, somehow, relate to the player which pegs or mechanisms have moved, so he knows how much strength to apply to rotating the cylindrical controller, with how much pressure to expel the little steel balls. In that talk, Carnegie-Mellon University professor Jesse Schell envisions a future in which everything is game-designed. . I’ll die.” Repeat 20 to 25 times, until, eventually, the other guy goes, “Oh, wait, you’re serious?” Maybe if I were a Japanese person, and I said this, they wouldn’t be attempting to detect irony, and it would go more smoothly. I can’t really say why — maybe because I didn’t grow up with it? No, that can’t be it: I once met a hardcore Japanese punk rock dude who brought up his own out-creeped-ness with the semantics of Japanese customary greetings completely independent of my input. NO SUBJECTIVITY Maybe this is the reason games and movies suck: Barely no one in the media ever says anything subjective about anything. Though man, in Tokyo, you can use them for so much: vending machines, supermarkets, whatever. Many of my Japanese rock-dude friends report being grunted at pretty often. Now, everyone has an iPod. Last year, a half-dozen shops in the covered shopping street between my house and JR Koenji Station shut down all at once. Japanese television is a way of programming the mannerisms of tomorrow’s society and/or/by propagating the mannerisms of yesterday. it’ll only have vegetables in it. People enjoyed drinking / eat / inhaling them. If there were more people in the office, and not just me, they would think you were not part of the team. SOME JAPANESE OFFICE TRADITIONS ARE GENUINELY TERRIFYING Every once in a while, you’re outside, and you find a huge crowd of people in suits and ties. Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms series titles were by far the consistently yellowest of all Super Famicom games. I don’t like knowing things like that. The birth rate in Japan is plummeting, and something like 33% of newlywed couples ask for two master bedrooms in their new homes. (If this idea morbidly amuses you, try Kobo Abe’s novel Kangaroo Notebook , in which a company man simply writes “Kangaroo Notebook” on a proposal form, exciting his boss’s interest and turning his life into a stressful hell. That doesn’t stop them from charging professional prices. This guy explained to the waitress in painstaking detail that we needed a salad with no chicken , no shrimp , and no tuna in it. Everyone knows who they are and what they are up to. American supermarkets will sometimes advertise a gallon of milk for $.99. There it was, with bacon. I have yet to find a single not-high-class Chinese restaurant in Tokyo that serves a single vegetarian dish. I can’t say for sure, though I reckon many Japanese men inherited certain speech idiosyncrasies by watching catch-phrase-oriented television programs. Anyway, I brought up the ” irasshaimase ” thing, and she groaned. Sooner or later, everyone is going to be connected on a service that tracks everything, Unlocking Achievements in all forms of art and entertainment, every game they play or book they read logged meticulously for future generations to see. In Tokyo, when consumers start thinking really hard , they end up spending more money: In the case of the Dragon Quest bar, that means they would buy more drinks. They wonder, “Why me?” Maybe this stirs up violent feelings in them. I ate one of the Chocolate Croissants. It sounds more like stereotyping in that context — that a “nice,” “good” person wouldn’t have a tattoo. I can’t imagine anyone playing Dynasty Warriors , by the way, without a cigarette in their mouth. Maybe that’s not it. Maybe the arcades only exist because people need some excuse to get away from their smoke-averse significant other and puff away. It exists. Or maybe it’s just me. “I’ve got to run,” I said. On the other hand, I didn’t get to enter the Dragon Quest bar, and that sucked. For example, Kazunori Yamauchi hadn’t even filled out the form completely for Gran Turismo ’s proposal. Many of the words used perfunctorily in the Japanese language have both useful purposes and cold, hard semantic meanings. Trains: Do I ever love riding Japanese trains — while playing Dragon Quest on DS, and drinking delicious Coca-Cola Zero. How are you doing today?” “. When you think about it, it makes some kind of marketing sense. Actually, I just made that definition up; let’s actually check Dictionary.com: hello interjection 1. Real estate is expensive 2. “That didn’t work,” someone said. What the hell are they doing? The chant soon becomes a scream. Well, what about a white guy with a tattoo? He’s obviously not in the yakuza. (This is going to be important later.) How prone are you to start a conversation with someone in such a situation? Probably not very. If the bar isn’t 60 feet underground (they usually are), someone whips out that phone, looks up “alcohol allergy,” and says “Oh, all that’ll happen is you’ll break out in some hives.” “It’s just hives, man.” Then I inevitably get someone leaning over and whispering to me, “Hives are not so bad. It used to be you could just use them to ride the train. I don’t like this because it seems like, if they really think the story is so great, why don’t they pour all that time and effort into making, say, one really spectacular, world-class film out of it? Oh, because of the money. I think it sounds more like someone just giving up and settling for what they have. About half of everyone wanted to work their way up a big company. He mentioned how Kurt Cobain apparently smoked five packs a day. Drinking = having fun 2. It’s a thing insecure Tokyo business owners do when they are afraid of their place being empty at peak hours. Eventually, they had a cafe. Certain times of the year roll around, and you can’t navigate a well-populated street without encountering a large group of screaming, chanting businesspeople. The underlying principle at work here — that businesspeople realize some people will ignore an entire selection of products because one does not appeal to them — is universal, I guess. Men in Japan nearly all transit through a phase, in their early twenties, where their favorite hobby is dressing up in their best clothes, standing in the middle of a crowded street with their best mates, and yelling single words at every reasonably attractive girl who walks by. You can’t ride a train, sometimes, without being surrounded by catch-phrases. They made a lot of little pastries, you know, just flinging shit at the wall. Also, it’s worth noting that certain other expressions, ejaculations, and exclamations in the Japanese language are also full words. There’s a TV screen in the middle of all pachinko machines, these days. Damn it, when I was eight years old , I loved feeling stressed when playing Final Fantasy . One of these Japanese franchise cafes was called Saint Marc’s. “Big budget” in the Japanese film industry usually means that shit was shot on Beta Cam. In such cases, the word indicated to customers that they should come closer to the stall, that they should buy their little dried fishes at your stall, and not the stall next to you, which sells the same things.” This explanation was good enough. Japanese people always tell me, “Oh, it’s just a Japanese thing. The absolute best example, however, involves a ramen shop I used to go to, because they offered a vegetarian-friendly ramen. He wasn’t given his fifteen minutes of fame because he was somehow more appealing or interesting than everyone else working in the field — it was simply his turn in line. You charge them up at terminals in the stations. Maybe it was popular because it was so well-designed. This is a thing that I know happens in white bread in other countries. They say “OMOSHIROOOOOI” when something is interesting. They’re doing this to show that they have some energy — any energy at all. My neighbor, once, smoked in his apartment, sitting by the window. If you grew up here, maybe you’d be okay with all of it.” Well, sure. I could complain about this, though I find it easy enough to ignore, so it doesn’t bother me. We were the only customers in the store. And it’s hard to find any other critical voices in Japan. The customer is already in the store, and they’re going to keep yelling at them, telling them to come in. So yeah, I’ve kind of come to hate on Chokokuro Cafe at every opportunity: If they’re so willing to just settle down and marry their proverbial high school sweetheart, why do they try to keep expanding? Eventually, they’re going to find they’ve expanded too far, spread themselves too thin. I wrote about this before. Someone in this group of juniors influenced them all to get into this circle. You know how they die? The same way that kid in Korea died while playing Counter-Strike : The very act of sitting and staring at a computer screen becomes something of an addiction in and of itself; they simply forget to use the toilet, or maybe have an aneurysm. I feel a transient pride, typing this, that my own native language is less conducive to such robot-like precision. It’s getting fairly ridiculous. They walk and run and walk-run everywhere with the things. “I just ordered you a salad!” The salad came. Cows can do other things aside from die and be cut up for steak. I never talked to that guy again! From that day on, when I arrived in the office and he was the only other person there, I wold snap my fingers, point directly at him, and then, when I had gotten his attention, I’d give him a sharp military salute, letting some huge “HOOH” sound escape the back of my throat. It’s not just comedy. “Chokokuro” is a little abbreviation, like “Pokemon” is to “Pocket Monsters.” “Chokokuro” is short for “Chokoreeto Kurowasan.” (In Japanese, as in French, the “t” in “Croissant” is silent.) Starbucks evolved from a small chain of cafes to a huge one by consistently introducing new products, constantly pushing the envelope. It’s like, append the positive form of this verb to the end of the stem of the verb in the sentence “It’s possible to do that”, and you can make the sentence mean “It’s not possible to do that.” Though since verbs end the sentences in Japan, it’s more like “Yes, we can do that for you — NOTTTTTT.” I mean, how is that “polite”? How is that the way to deal with people in business? Do people feel really great whenever they use that in a professional conversation? Do they feel like they just scored a four-hit combo in Street Fighter IV ? EVERYONE’S UNCLE There’s a distinct personality type existing all over Japan. So the ultimate reward for playing pachinko is money. Good employees like to have fun 3. That makes sense. Brain Training is a tool to keep your mind active. The initial reaction was, “That’s what the game designers do!” It took days of near-futile conversation to uncover the controversial finding that, prior to designing a game for the first time, people like Shigeru Miyamoto had actually never designed any games. You must be hearing things. The girls are not only willing to talk to the customers — it’s their job , so they have to. This is interesting because, sometimes, you’ll be looking at your coupon box, and go, “Man, I could have saved like fifteen percent on like six pizzas! If only I ate more pizza! ” This epiphany is about as richly cathartic as any big story reveal or any any battle-system-related “Aha” in any Japanese RPG. Why encourage these niches? Eventually, the people who started the joke see how seriously it’s being taken. His alarm clock, programmed to go off every morning at 5am, woke me up every Saturday. They do this because this is how it used to be, so that’s probably how it should be, forever. Many times, the someone being bumped into has had a hard day of apologizing to his superiors six times an hour, perfunctorily, every time they come back into the office from a cigarette break. I guess I look like a bit of a flake. So most people who buy new games race through them lovelessly so they can sell them back to the local used shop before the buyback price drops. A Japanese friend who works in marketing told me this is the “Japanese resolve.” A company sees its fate and resigns itself to it. 2. Here is the part of the story where someone in the audience interjects, “Mmm! Delicious grease bubbles!” Save it, asshole! Let me finish: I don’t eat meat because I don’t like things like grease bubbles. I know what’s meat and what’s not meat,” was my ultimate closing argument. There’s this “Neon Genesis Evangelion” pachinko machine, based on the popular animated series from over ten years ago. You then receive a microchipped card that will allow you to purchase cigarettes from vending machines. Oh, god. In Hollywood, yes, it’s true that almost everything is a remake or a sequel. I was going to say that I’ve noticed little trends in the design of Japanese games and/or game-console software. You might have similar cards in your city elsewhere in the world. The coupons expire in two weeks. If I were to blindly and deafly heed the command semantically buried in his polite perfunctory greeting, it would require me to abandon my act of genuinely curious commercialism. He paused. I know what’s meat and what’s not meat.” We ended with a little “agree to disagree” thing. Taspo had something of the same effect on my friend’s friend. I know some people have some great conversations in Japan, usually with the TV off, though hanging out with those people didn’t earn me financial stability, much less the right to continue to live in this country, so I had to stick with the people who need the TV to know how to react to a delicious meal. I once put a note in his mailbox: “You know, if you’re going to blow the smoke out the window — if you don’t love smoking enough to just close the windows and turn your apartment into a hot-box, maybe you should just quit.” He never quit. Like, during orientation at a Japanese company, you’re told to use the word ” Otsukaresamadesu! ” when greeting other employees either in the hallway, at the coffee machine, or even on a train station platform on the weekend. Also, games tend to pretty much always cost $100 on their release dates here. Business is like a shark: it moves forward, or it stops breathing. They only receive phone calls, once a month, with bank transfer information. I wonder why. The sounds were pleasing, the friction of the pen on the DS screen felt just right (I’ve “played” a friend’s copy). My problem is that ” irasshaimase ” actually means something in both ancient and modern Japanese. I do not use the word “indecipherable” lightly. In fact, he’s going to get promoted, and he’s going to be telling you what to do, and he’s going to be pulling figures off the internet, and going, “Oh, it looks like this game called Halo 3 has twenty-seven guns in it. You have to play by the rules. I only once worked for a company big enough to have Gather And Scream events every morning, though I was lucky enough to work in a division with mostly old dudes who weren’t expected to participate, so that made me not expected to participate, either. Usually, it’s anime. Maybe I would have become desensitized to it. Classic video games from the 1990s: Goemon 2 is the shit, dude. You can input your salary and bank account balance and all that. If you don’t purchase the drink ticket, they won’t let you in. I could never see his face, though I could definitely smell his tobacco, because the smoke exited his window and promptly entered mine. “So much for that idea,” someone else said. Everyone in the office then shouts “Good morning!” back to you. I don’t know. iTunes can’t even get a break over here: When you can rent an entire CD for $4 and then rip it, why buy the songs for $2 each? Of course, the bands I like typically don’t have their CDs available for rent at the major chains. Most people aren’t. In his presentation, Schell mentions a little tree-shaped virtual-pet-kind-of thing on the dashboard of the Toyota Prius. :-/ THE “DRINK TICKET” SYSTEM When you go see a live musical performance, the venues always force you to pay at least 500 yen for a “drink ticket.” They do this even if you’re on the guest list! It’s weird. They say things like “SUGOOOOI” when something impressive happens. The reason for the tattoo hatred is, so the urban legend goes, to keep the yakuza out of the gym / bathing area. He didn’t stop pausing. I have a lot of fun, lately, making up the weirdest fake reasons for not eating meat: My favorite one is saying that I don’t eat meat because I wouldn’t want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill. I’d probably also get a profound apology. CAN VIDEOGAMES MAKE US BETTER PEOPLE? Stephen Totilo can corroborate when I say that I had originally planned to call this month’s column “Can Videogames Make Us Better People?” [ Note From Stephen: Tim speaks the truth. In college, people are confused, because they don’t have uniforms. Only — I think — the producers and marketers of games in Japan are particularly out of touch with their fan-base. As my frame of reference for “Not Japan,” I’ll try to use San Francisco. It’s inbred trailer-trash in entertainment form: Every season’s new Japanese animation places one-upmanship of every single aspect of the last season higher on their list of priorities than even “make something entertaining.” The same can perhaps be said of all Japanese entertainment, though it’s not relevant anywhere else as much as it is in anime. It used to be okay. FG: Anyway, let’s get star—hey! Did you just call me fat? SG: No, I didn’t. Damn it! This topic applies to me pretty directly, so I have researched it on and off over the years. What’s going to happen, then? Businesses like Chokokuro Cafe are nonchalantly dumping tiny little rabbit turds into the ocean-sized reservoir of the world economy. It scared the shit out of me. I never went there again. Or, no, this is better — the Japanese entertainment industry is like what would happen if ABC, NBC, and CBS announced that they were replacing the hosts of all of their late-night talk shows with Regis Philbin, starting immediately. The video clips expand to fill our entire TV screens; a picture-in-picture shows the faces of these Famous For Being Famous people as they react. (used to express a greeting, answer a telephone, or attract attention.) There you have it. For some reason, the longer I live in Tokyo, the more this really shits me off. We are not born with a natural inclination to, you know, need to dress in gaudy clothes, tell men up-front that sex is an impossibility because of contract stipulations, and then proceed to take their money in exchange for the service of acting surprised whenever they mention how tired they are from work. How this relates to games : So you have all these little niches, right? How many of them, really, need to exist? You have people sitting around in planning rooms going, “How are we going to get more money?” “Whose money are we going to get next?” It’s fairly simple why they want this money. These girls, who usually earn more money than their clients, exist in a culturally unique gray area between customer and employee. These are the kinds of things the people who make your favorite Japanese games are forced to do every day. “I’M SORRY, IT DOESN’T HAVE VERY MUCH STUFF IN IT” I used to go to this restaurant with a really delicious pepperoncini pasta. This explanation, recently, actually drew the serious response, “Well, if you can’t kill the animal, you can’t eat it!” This, tangentially, highlights another problem I have with Japan — that people don’t get sarcasm or irony, though maybe I’m wrong here, and maybe the person who gave that response was just a genius wielding his own sarcasm so fake-seriously. No one wants to hurt anyone else’s money. I think, in general, the Japanese seem to be comfortable stereotyping and being stereotyped. However low the numerical scores may be, however, the reviewers seldom say anything negative. This bothers me, sure, though what also bothers me is when, on a weekday afternoon, I’m walking on a quaint little street in another town, and the loudspeakers are blaring classical music. Well, I can now curiously report that, on a recent trip to a super market, I couldn’t find a single loaf of white bread that didn’t have lard in it. Now, the ultimate pick-up is to score with a girl who you were willing to pay money simply to talk to, who you met under circumstances that allowed her to do anything with you except relate to you sexually. Oh, and then, there’s the creepy SOB who wears a track suit, holds two one-kilogram weights at shoulder-level, stands in the middle of the free weights area, and shakes his hands almost like he’s miming running up a flight of stairs. However, since phrases like “lard-ass” and “tub of lard” successfully penetrated to the deepest levels of the collective modern English-speaking human consciousness around twenty years ago, food companies all over the place are avoiding the word’s appearance on their ingredient labels. 3. The old people are the majority, and they don’t like us because we lack the drive they had. Not two years later, Saint Marc’s Cafe had changed the name of all their locations to “Chokokuro Cafe”. They hit eighty, join my gym, and start screaming. If I’m going to be forced to play it, I might as well live somewhere I can get affordable groceries more suited to my lifestyle. I once saw a video on YouTube of the game Infinite Undiscovery , in which the hero said “Cutitout!” every time he got hit. Starbucks made lots of different kinds of coffees and treats. I had fun, one day, by taking mental note of what games were the yellowest. People aren’t having sex, and they’re not trying to set the world on fire financially, either. Anyway, lots of people started cafes, for some reason or another, right around the time Starbucks really took off. Around this time, a lot of Japanese kids whose parents had ridden high during the Pre-Sony-Walkman-Era boom were just graduating college. Very seldom are the words actual words. My favorite example is The Chokokuro Cafe. This really works in Japanese, because every syllable ends with a vowel, making it friendly to exclamations. I knew from the beginning that I would never “fit in” whether I wanted to or not; well, this was probably around when the rest of the world got the memo. It’s a great system. When I first came to Japan, and learned that ” irasshaimase ” meant “come [into the store]!” I expressed a certain amount of confusion to the dude who was playing the part of my tour guide. Okay, this happens in the West, too — BioWare got started from the idea of making medical software. . I know someone’s going to say I’m a racist, or being intolerant, or whatever, though man, that kind of thing is creepy as hell. Right? So what the hell? They just immediately changed their name to reflect the name of the first product that brought them moderate success. This means my drummer can’t work out in my gym with me. FG: Oh, if you say so— SG: You really ARE fat, though! FG: Heyyyyyyy!! Sudden stop. Well, it’s that kind of thing. You can set up a budget plan and it’ll tell you how much money you should spend per day. . [Note: I only love trains on weekdays around noon, when they're not crowded.] 4. They had a big sign out front: “We’ve moved everything in the store! Come in and take a look!” Uh, okay. Hostess clubs have become the stuff of video games in recent years, and I hesitate to postulate that the idea of a dating simulation video-game was born of the oldest traditional ancestors of hostess clubs. This is the guy who Don’t Do Shit at the office usually. Well, these days, people have iPhones, which are more or less like Japanese cellular phones, only browsing the Internet doesn’t cost six dollars a page load. hard to just think of something off the top of my head.” “Here’s one you can use — just come out and immediately say, ‘So, I just want to confess, I haven’t jerked off in four years. Maybe these things really don’t bother other people so much. Or else it’s just guys with huge hair and impossible weapons shouting jargon. “Look, man, I don’t eat meat. Most of the time, they put it on sideways, instead of vertically — you know, the way that would prevent the barcode from being scanned by a rogue scanner. Well, they’ve done fucked up a whole lot of shit, financially speaking. ] Then, I saw this presentation from this year’s DICE conference. I get hives when I eat mushrooms. Man, I hate this kind of guy. Though you know what, if I’m going to choose my place to live based entirely on how little I mind the surrounding people, or if I’m going to live somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with people at all ,it might as well be somewhere I wouldn’t have to pay quite as much for vegetarian recipe ingredients. To determine whether this is the case or not, I plan to type up a list of things I don’t like about Japan. I’m also sure that it’s a good idea to address the unavoidable comment that I sound like a person who wouldn’t be happy anywhere: Maybe this is true. When I first came here, I liked living here. Once, shortly after getting a new job, a coworker announced he was getting up to smoke a cigarette. The former is just a simple kind of productivity software, which you can use to keep track of how much money you spend, and on what. Okay, I’m not going to glorify this. Every time the automatic doors open as a customer enters or leaves, if one of the windows in my home is open, I can hear the dense Eurobeat emanating out. I’m sure if they developed easy retinal scan technology, the Japanese would slap a cute-looking eyeball mascot on the advertisements and people would be lined up to volunteer their information for the system. Who knows what the products have to be? There’s a lot of at-wall shit-flinging. Apparently, some stores actually demand that employees enlisted as barkers absolutely refrain from using actual words. This is really common: it seems like they have no idea what the company is going to be. The idea is that the venues are not primarily places people go to listen to music: they are places owned by people who want to make money from bands who want a place to play a show. Good for her. The guys in this company were the type to sit at their desks with bowls of terrible convenience-store ramen through the night. Eventually, this escalates to a point where either someone gets punched in the throat or kicked in the nuts, or someone just goes home and drinks himself to a dreamless sleep and a morning hangover. Entertainment distilled to an impenetrable essence: Final Fantasy XIII is such a good example for this: They took out all the towns and all of the situations where you feel like you own the world in some small part. Try skipping a party as an employee of a Japanese company: Instantly, you’re The Guy Who Skipped The Party, you’re The Guy Who Doesn’t Care About The Company. I’ve talked about hostess clubs at length in a previous column (“can videogames be our friends?”). They just had a couple of cafes in Tokyo. You must smoke. . You may know hostess clubs from the Ryu ga gotoku or Yakuza games. —- tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net , which is a fancy way of saying he’s the founder and one of three completely unpaid employees. I call it “Everyone’s Uncle”. I couldn’t do this, though, because, despite their having nine empty tables, my friend and I weren’t allowed in! You know why? Because we had failed to reserve our table twenty-four hours in advance. They’re just companies. Maybe if I moved out to Osaka, things would be better. Watch people crossing the street with umbrellas. People who can apologize well are respected! Be sure to apologize every time you pick up the phone! Miss one, and you’ll lose points! Your score in this game is represented by the balance of your bank account. It’s a pretty idiotic capsule form of the entire Japanese entertainment industry. WEIRD RESERVATION RULES I wanted to write a story for Kotaku.com (this website right here) about what it was like to go visit the Dragon Quest IX -themed “Luida’s Bar” in Roppongi. Yeah, ever since that day my microwave malfunctioned, I can’t reach my hand high enough over my head!” “I don’t get it. I should just write off a few of my frustrations as quickly as possible, or else we’ll be here all day tomorrow as well: EVERYTHING MOVES Every damn store I ever go to always moves every single item from one side of the store to the other every three months. In all world cultures, meat has always been associated with an act of sacrifice. Sooner or later, you’ll be able to use them everywhere. She immediately prostrates herself by shouting a — oh, wait. What I’ve realized, recently, is that the skeleton of rules of the “game” of “life” is just too visible here in Japan, where multiple perfunctory sentences are required to start any conversation, where you can use a certain positive verb to soften the preconceived impact of a negative verb form, where you can prove mathematically that you are a good person by drinking alongside everyone else, by being the last to go home every day, by ritualistically screaming in the middle of the street after a company party. Her first explanation was the knee-jerk: “It’s a Japanese thing.” Her second explanation was to give me a history lesson: ” Irasshaimase is a greeting that dates back hundreds of years, when shops were traditionally stalls in a marketplace. I could rattle off curious examples for hours — like how “Indian” curry powder I liked once happily advertised “Now With Beef Extract” on the can. The speakers are illegally placed; the businesses advertising on the service have never met a representative of the advertising service. Way back when people first started suiciding abundantly in front of express trains, many train stations installed mirrors across the platform. It doesn’t always work, of course. Starbucks is a western corporation, and forward-thinking enough to say ” Konnichiwa ” (“Hello”) and not ” Irasshaimase .” Okay, let’s say you go into some Japanese franchise cafe, and the hella-hot girl behind the counter immediately prostrates herself by speaking that sharp little sentence-word-knife. As brick-and-mortar game stores, for example disappear, as everyone starts ordering all their clothing online, will this turn completely into a city of pachinko parlors and love hotels? Math, and fucking , as it were? Is that what it is? Two people have sex; ninety years later, you’re breathing nicotine and just trying to spend everything as effortlessly as possible before you die. Long ago, manga aspired to be like Dragon Ball Z : graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be. Some part-time kid fresh out of college sat there with a notebook, writing down literally everything everyone said. We’ve got, uhh, about sixteen people.” And then he pumps his fist and says, “We’re just gonna hafta work overtime!” No we’re not, asshole. Also, I suspect that the Pokemon “Koffing” isn’t a symbol of the evils of pollution — he’s Japan’s Joe Camel, hooking kids on the power and might of smoke. You know, because these guys put in soul-crushing work hours and could probably use the encouragement from the company. Well, what about the people who, like me, simply find the smoke terrible? That’s why they have smoking sections at restaurants. What does this have to do with videogames? Have you ever played a game, really liked it, and then found that the sequel went and added something you didn’t want, or something that just didn’t apply to you? I hate when that happens! Also, that many times the people old enough to make important decisions at the companies producing your favorite videogames are literally stupid and/or ignorant enough to think that bacon is not meat. JAPANESE COMEDY IS NOT FUNNY I can’t get behind Japanese comedy. You are really not helping your reputation by refusing to drink, here.” I’m not going to blame just this society-fragment for the poor state of the economy, or even the low birth rate. “You know, aside from ‘ irasshaimase ‘, they’re not using actual words, most of the time.” He had prior job experience, see. I didn’t say good morning to him. What’s most intriguing is that — every time I’ve ever talked to a Japanese businessperson about a product that was actually monstrously successful, it seems that the one thing the boss respected most about their proposal was how it was worded so simply. So when I told a friend, “Oh, I’m going to go home tonight and write a column for Kotaku.com,” he said, “Oh, so you’re going to write about Japan?” For a second, I thought he had read my mind. You know, cardboard, up against concrete, is not only not uncomfortable — it’s pretty good for your spine! I pushed further: “What if I am the second person in the office, and the first person is someone with whom I have, previously, managed to successfully cultivate a congenial personal relationship? What if it’s a person whose first and last name I know, with whom I share interests and hobbies, and we’ve previously agreed that we think this ‘Good morning’ shit is some serious bullshit, and we just agree to be like, ‘Hey, what’s up’ to one another in the morning and we’ve also agreed that hey, if anyone else asks , we’ll just go ahead and say ‘Oh yeah, that dude totally screamed “Good morning” to me this morning’?” The HR girl didn’t even blink: “You still have to carry out the customary ‘Good Morning.’” How this relates to videogames : That company I talk about in the above paragraphs? They were a (pretty big) Japanese game company. The old men don’t like people who are not in the same exact situation as themselves. In other news, looking at my outline of to-be-written bullet points, I am struck by just how many of them concern screaming. At the end of the day, it was the same thing. In The Real Life, I am stress-free. Every song is about people meeting for the first time, about how they’ll never forget when they met for the first time, or how “because of you positive [adjective]“. Once, a Japanese co-worker, who had gone to Tokyo University and somehow survived on Planet Earth for more than fifty years without decapitating himself on a bathroom door frame, insisted on my ordering some food at a company party I was forced to attend. Japanese comedy finds a way out of the TV. After my grandfather died, my grandmother set about spending as much of his money as quickly as possible. At least football players like playing football. When someone is hurt, they typically don’t make a surprised sound such as “Ow”, they say ” itai ” — “[adjective meaning] painful”. “Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?” I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: “If we’re the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream ‘Good Morning’ and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?” Her answer was immediate, and humorless: “Yes.” “Well, I mean, there’s no one else around to hear it, right?” “You still have to do it. In China, however, nearly half of everything is vegetarian. It’s real life. However, the kid in the Jeansmate, years ago, wasn’t standing behind a stall. Then there’s the issue of movie stars. A Chinese friend once told me that Chinese restaurants in Japan serve only dishes with meat in them as some kind of subconscious celebration of their finding success in a foreign land. I was going to say something along the same lines, though probably with a lot more words. :-/ POSITIVE NEGATIVES Again, this is a language issue, though again, I am going to presume that it accounts for a decent amount of passive aggression. The magazine publishers and content providers are such a close-knit group that they silently agree to say only positive things. I’m sure the publishers have crunched the numbers a thousand times, and come up with some reason to justify not lowering the initial price of a typical game. The voice of these advertisements is an old woman who sounds like she got lost on the walk home from the supermarket. From where she stands at the edge of the synapse marked “Come into the store!” she can just about touch the synapse marked “You are the master, and I am a lowly slave!” with her index finger. The comedians or ex-comedians to whom I express this opinion all sigh, say, “You know, man, I’d love to get out there and do some edgy jokes, though that’s just not how it works here, man. ” One particular comedy routine I once witnessed involved two guys — a skinny guy and a fat guy. And anyway, maybe some of these people who like videogames enough to learn how to program them might have some decent ideas of what they like or don’t like in game design? What happened, eventually, was an email: “ALL EMPLOYEES ARE REQUIRED TO REPORT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM IMMEDIATELY FOR A BRAINSTORMING SESSION RE: GAME DESIGN”. At least they had the guts to say something public about it. I read several weekly Japanese business magazines, and I once read one where a columnist reported some figures from some Japanese PhD’s recent research findings: Apparently, “putting on the impression of being busy” is mathematically proven to be “more important” for making money than either “offering good products” or “offering good service”. The police won’t touch the advertisements, because the situation sounds like the yakuza are involved. High school students will do it to celebrate their anticipation of successful performance on, like, college entrance exams. How this relates to videogames : We have centuries of literature and decades of film from which to draw artistic inspiration; we have 1080p graphics and processors capable of displaying tens of thousands of high-definition polygons rotating at the scale speed of sound. This is the agenda: to never stress any players again. He gets on the chest press machine, puts it down on the lowest weight — five kilograms — puts his hands on the handlebars, and screeeeeeams like he’s taking a dump on a planet of extreme gravity. So hostess clubs proliferated. Like, the biggest electronics stores actually keep ladders on hand so that certain employees can climb the ladders and scream indecipherable words down at the customers, through megaphones. You might wonder, “How is this happen?” Man, there are so many reasons. They’re all drunk. They say “OISHISOU!” when something looks delicious. Only rather than humbly ask the vegetarian magazine if it was alright to remove the vegetarian magazine logo, they decided to humbly apologize that the recipe had changed , and the vegetarian ramen’s broth now included pork bone marrow, so they would have to stop advertising as safe for vegetarians. It’s not much of a “game.” Though there it is. It was also distinctly lacking in iridescent grease bubbles floating on the surface of the ramen. We were in a Jeansmate — a Japanese jeans store that is inexplicably open twenty-four hours a day, even in towns where (as in ours) the only god damn supermarket closes at eight in the PM. Our game only has, what, four? We need to step it up!” And you say, “Well, Halo 3 was made by a team of like six hundred people. TAPE If I buy a drink at a convenience store and say I don’t want a bag, they insist on putting a little piece of tape over the barcode. It’s a cliched kind of situation. Bands put out a bunch of money to rent the place out for the night. They must have moved the coffee machine like twenty-four times in one year. A minute later, I was about to get up. That’s a joke. Believe it or not, though, I am the kind of person who focuses on the positive things until, one at a time, I manage to wear them out. He came over to my desk about two minutes after I’d settled in. That’s how I found it. So lately, they’re trying to cut down on people smoking. I had excused myself the day before the party, saying I’d only be able to sit in for a half an hour at the most — a moving truck was coming to my apartment that very night. Men say “UMAI!” immediately after taking a minuscule bite of food, sometimes before they even swallow, in this nasal voice, in a tone like they just ran up a flight of stairs . (Among other things.) What this has to do with videogames : Once, when I was working for a Japanese game company as something of a liaison to help them develop games with a more future-proof “western” method, I suggested that every employee be, at all points in the process, encouraged to offer input on things such as game design. He was immediately greeted with an automaton-like voice: “QUANTIFY: ‘ENCOURAGEMENT’”. And though game designers all know that more interesting methods of communication are possible, when you hit enemies in Final Fantasy XIII , huge numbers fly out in every direction. So, sometimes, this person who’s just been bumped on accident sharply and angrily bumps into someone else, on purpose. It’s been said, many times, in many ways, that the Japanese are an intense people. In China, meat is associated with wealth and success. What things, though? Well, maybe the people wouldn’t bother me so much. Either way, I’ve never heard a story about someone who got fired directly because they didn’t go to a company party. “Oh,” I said. Nothing about any one particular video clip deliberately says “Now the little flap on the right side is going to open.” Pachinko machines were originally strictly for amusement. First of all, her saying she’d “heard about it” was stated so generically that she could have been indicating she’d heard about it from a friend or from some media source. I mean, that was all he did. You need some outside influence, I said. I learned a lot about marketing from that woman, literally and figuratively. Like, there was this guy who dressed up roughly as a player from the “Lion King” musical, stood on stage, and chanted like at the beginning of “The Circle of Life.” He would occasionally stop, be awkwardly silent for a moment, and then start chanting again. “I figured you must smoke because, you know; you play video games.” That’s a real stereotype, man. The second person bumped in our little example is officially the victim of a violent outburst. Maybe, in the Japanese version, he was saying ” Yamero !”, which pretty much means “Quit it!” or “Cut it out!” Man, it was really weird to hear that. Seats are limited in cinemas 4. If you say it like that, it comes out as sensationalist and weird. This happens a lot with games. Like, we have the word “Hello” in English, right? “Hello” doesn’t mean anything. I walk by that pachinko parlor every time I go to JR Koenji Station. It’s pretty terrifying to see how often it happens. I’m told, sometimes, that at such functions at the Mandatory Cherry Blossom-Viewing Party every company holds every year in the nearest large park, if you just relax and enjoy yourself, it’s not so bad, and sometimes it’s not bad at all. The account changes sometimes. The suggestion that non-vegetarians might be put-off by the inclusion of the vegetarian magazine’s seal of approval was immediately heeded. Every employee must do this. A coworker prepared a new variety of cup ramen for lunch; another co-worker looked at it and said “UMASOOOOOU” like he was on TV. The reason was obvious: digital games will be everything sooner or later. “This salad . I was looking at jeans, and an employee, standing nearby, was repeatedly yelling ” Irrashaimase ” at my roommate and I. I don’t want cigarette smoke near my organic vegetables! Hel-lo? That makes them pretty much not organic anymore! You might as well just be buying them from a hobo, at that point. It’s a different kind of culture. If I was thirty years old, and I put on a suit, and I’m still wearing the suit at age seventy, and I still don’t have a car, or a chauffeur to drive me home when I’m drunk, or at least money to pay for a taxi, man, I’m taking that fuckin’ suit off. As long as the boss sees him going and getting at the party, this guy is not going to lose his job anytime soon. If you don’t use the coupon, it will never disappear from your “Coupon Inbox”. Without getting too heavy into specifics, let’s just say that the Japanese entertainment industry is like what would happen if, every single year, One Movie Studio released precisely three films each starring Batman, Superman, Spider-man, and Iron Man, with the same actor in the lead role of all of them. Now, there’s nothing wrong with limiting one’s ambitions, in theory. For now, I’ll summarize: Hostess clubs are bars that hire girls who dress entirely in the modern fashion befitting girls who work at hostess clubs. This works, because groceries are very impulse-friendly. I haven’t changed. Japan hasn’t really changed, either. They have a little magazine — which, in Japan, means that it’s huge, glossy, printed on cardboard, costs around $20, and comes with a free six-hour DVD. slam their opened umbrella into someone else’s. Well. I’m sure it’s only ever happened indirectly. That kind of bothers me. When is something like Nintendo’s “Finance Diary” going to be implemented into ATMs? Well, cash will near-completely fade away, at some point in the future. “You forgot to say good morning.” “Yeah, I know, dude. That, or they go play pachinko. When you reach the goal, you have earned the right to play a game with much simpler rules. Hmm. Eventually, we’ll enter another topic, which is much more directly related to video games. They graduate and immediately find an excuse to wear a suit, even to companies with no dress code, so that everyone on the train might know where they stand in their life. Then there are things like how Dominos Pizza, should you register for their web-based pizza ordering service, will send you digital coupons. Many bread-makers substitute oils, butter, or — god help us — margarine. The meeting was a terrible failure. I don’t like eating dirty things. His explanation was that employees who are actually happy, or content, or who feel appreciated, generally do better work. If you’re considering renting the entire first five seasons of “LOST” one episode at a time, you might want to also consider taking out a loan. When a mild celebrity says a food item “LOOKS DELICIOUS!!” their tone is so rehearsed and sterile that it might as well be a statement of fact. Nobody wants to retire, because if they work a little bit harder, their ideal retirement yacht might grow an extra bedroom. That was a spring nearly ruined. Why not “Tim-san”? I’m required to put “san” on the end of their names. Now, it’s not. At my orientation for one company, the Human Resources Girl — whose face (figuratively) literally screamed “Hall Monitor” — was going over the “Good Morning!” protocol. I think the thing she might have hated most about me was that I didn’t hate her. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE ASK THE NEAREST EMPLOYEE.” It’s like, man — “really good at apologizing” is a shitty thing to write on a culture’s resume. Someone must have noticed how close Japanese polite society stands to a brave new service industry populated by individuals who literally proclaim to every customer, “You are the master! I am the servant! You are awesome! I am scum!” Maybe there was a manga with a maid in it, and maybe some people thought that was funny and made jokes about it; it escalated, and they started drawing their own comics; eventually, the marketers caught wind of it, and it became A Thing. It’s business. Dude took a bite of the ramen, slurping it loudly, like people do on TV, like you’re supposed to do it. The waitress looked over the little notepad in her hands. TEMPLATE CONVERSATIONS CREEP ME OUT I swear, at every party I’ve ever been to in Japan, this exact conversation has occurred, word for word: “Ahh! Beer!” “This beer is delicious!” “Yes! This beer is delicious!” “There’s nothing quite so delicious as a cold beer after a hard day of work!” You know those trees in “Lord of the Rings”, where they have to sit in a circle for an hour making low sounds just to say “hello” to one another? That’s what this is like. If you do use the coupon, it does disappear. They just got out of a mandatory company party in the nearest wooden-submarine-like Japanese restaurant whose menu consists of whatever fell off the garbage truck as it peeled away from a flock of particularly aggressive crows that morning. It was a very real, legitimate excuse. STOP APOLOGIZING TO ME So yesterday, at my favorite used book store: a guy held a mouthpiece and spoke over the PA, repeating the same message for the duration of my perplexed wandering: “DEAR HONORABLE CUSTOMERS: THERE IS NO EXCUSE: IT IS WITH GRAVE FEAR IN OUR HEARTS THAT WE APOLOGIZE SINCERELY FOR MOVING EVERYTHING IN THE STORE. This was also the guy (or girl) who was always out all night Friday night, and never got home until around 2pm on Saturdays. I’m sure if I said I’d feel sorry for the kids, someone would point out how Japanese people seem to pretty much never get lung cancer — maybe because of all the green tea, or walking — so it’s not so bad if the kids grow up to be smokers. friend his band on myspace , follow him on twitter , or email him at 108 (at) action button (dot! (net!)) Japan Mt. Oh no! You messed up today! The company lost money. Would you like something with some substance?” The man thought for a second: “Bacon!” “Okay”, said the waitress, and hurried away. “Where are you going?” the guy asked. The venue gets to keep the money from the drink sales. They’re screaming for screaming’s sake. I get really ugly noises — teeth-sucking, lip-flicking, throaty grunts — every time I get on a train. I went into my favorite local used book store the other day, and couldn’t find anything . (Not saying that friends you make at work aren’t “real” friends, though hey.) It is only in a social climate where chatting up a shop-girl is considered arcane black magic that a concept like a hostess club can exist. The boss is nowhere in sight. Man, life is like the world’s most boring MMORPG. Every once in a while, you’ll see someone just . In short, if you’ve ever worked at an office anywhere in the world, you’ve done about the same degree of actual work that Japanese people do in Japanese companies. Some women’s magazine must have written a review or a recommendation of it. Once I got back from the toilet, I thought about it some more, and realized that Japanese television is mostly something people put on in the background; it’s wallpaper for conversations. In a voice just above a casual conversation, he counts his “reps” — from “one” to well past a thousand. Eventually, someone higher up in the administration of the parent company was running down a checklist of things they could do to make more money. Tokyo is the city that invented the transparent umbrella — that’s a plus, I guess — and it probably came about to help people walk without bumping into one another. Like, “Here you go! Listen to this music! This is how you should feel right now!” Life isn’t a television drama, or a movie, or a video game, man. I checked the ingredients: It definitely had crab in it. Okay, here’s what I think is the crux of my problem. I say the comedy is antiquated and Bob-Hope-like. In Japan, everyone just keeps their hands under the table. THE WEATHER This was 2009. I keep my TV off religiously. Anime used to answer the questions of kids’ dreams: ” How awesome would it be to be a world-class assassin / kung-fu master / robot pilot / baseball hero?” Now it’s just a bunch of shit pandering to perverts and pedophiles. The general consensus is that, if a guy doesn’t want to go to a party and get terribly drunk with everyone else in the company, then he obviously has some element of his outside life — a girlfriend, a hobby, et cetera — that is more important to him than the company, so any work he does is less worthy of trust than any work done by anyone who “respects the company” enough to go to all the parties and match the boss drink for drink. A couple years later, another person learned I didn’t smoke, and acted surprised. I’ve expressed my dislike for it to many people, including people trying to make it in the field of this very form of comedy. Only — get this — the poster also included the manga panels, so you could know exactly how much the actors looked like the characters in the manga. People unable to get in are then forced to think really hard about getting in next time. Will Japan evolve because of this, or will it only continue its deepening spiral into the realm of my disinterest? Thanks to several recent developments in my life, I’ve realized that life is really just a game, and that I’m so dissatisfied with games (like Final Fantasy XIII ) lately, because I am approaching them as games within a game. So now, of course, the ultimate pick-up is to sleep with a hostess who you meet by being a customer in her workplace. Eventually, a guy just barely outgrows the “Big Brother” personality type, and suddenly becomes like everyone in the room’s uncle. Or maybe they’re expected to eat so much that they get tired. 1. The bands divide up the ticket sales. Immediately, she has placed herself beneath you. You can see where this is going. It’s not me so much as it’s all people younger than 80. I don’t know why! I like to take the tape off, stick it to my receipt, and then drop it into the little trash can by the register. Don’t let the hype fool you: Japanese arcades are great because, you know, video games, though man, there is a hell of a lot of smoking going on in those places, man. Before that, I want to say that all of the Japanese people I know who know of Kotaku.com and are also not complete and total game freaks seem to be under the impression that Kotaku.com is a “website about Japanese culture.” Maybe that’s interesting. I like this example a lot: Starbucks suddenly existed; people loved it. So, wait, if everyone knows that the people aren’t saying actual words, why don’t they, like, get pissed about it? I mean, that’s some serious “The Matrix” bullshit right there. Animal Crossing and Brain Training were extremely popular, money-making software products, though both of them had feet planted in The Real. In short — and maybe this is just a theory — if I move someplace new, I like it for a while, until finally I can’t stand it. This can’t possibly be unique to me. Maybe the Japanese don’t get severe brain damage from screaming all night in the death-like frigidity of a winter night, though they do sometimes pass out. So, one day, we got an email: “THIS FRIDAY AT SIX PM, EVERY EMPLOYEE IS REQUIRED TO REPORT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM TO EAT PIZZA”. It’s worth noting that I got friendly with a guy in the office — and one day, he happened to be first in the office, and I was second. As if having four Starbuckses on one city block wasn’t bad enough, you now had to deal with literally four Starbuckses and then one of each of two dozen other franchise Starbucks clones. The latter is like Animal Crossing , only the characters are humans — Nintendo Wii Miis, actually — and thus maybe easier to relate to. The price is fixed at pretty much the precise point at which movie tickets will sell out CDs are so expensive because, ever since the earliest days of CDs, rental has been legal. It seeps directly into normal people’s conversations. My main beef here is that, in the hip, beautiful town of Koenji, in which I live, the only franchise cafe is a Chokokuro Cafe, not a Starbucks. You look it up in a dictionary, and it’ll say “Word used to greet someone in a friendly manner”. Nothing stuck. Occasionally, I’ll be out eating dinner with friends, and young people at a nearby table will be talking about opening a business. You wouldn’t understand. THE MANDATORY PARTIES The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. I have a “habit” of applying the “rules” of the game of life to the things I do for “fun.” I might have mentioned before: I never believed in Santa Claus, et cetera.

Related Stories