AKA Photos I Don't Have Much to Write About
I used to, as you can probably tell just by looking at me, be pretty into video games. But strangely, ever since coming to Japan I've started to lose interest in them. You'd probably expect the exact opposite effect since Japan is basically Video Game Mecca, but I liken it to finally meeting a celebrity you've obsessively admired for a long time only to discover that he's 5'4". Sure, you can still enjoy his movies after that, but you'll probably want to think about turning over the Fan Club Presidency to someone else as well.
Anyway, none of this changes the fact that Japanese arcades are filled with all sorts of game genres that are unfamiliar and therefore enragingly stupid to me. Observe:
This 'game' -- and I use the term loosely -- is called "Photo Battle". Because you know, everything in this country must be some sort of "battle", or at least involve some measure of conflict between two horribly anthropomorphized things. "Photo Battle" constitutes, as far as I'm concerned, a gross misappropriation of resources and funds that could otherwise be devoted to researching and building cool futuristic robots like "Rosie" on The Jetsons. It is the mechanical equivalent of an Andy Dick or Kathy Griffin; a literal waste of organs that could be put to much better use if taken from them and stuffed into almost anyone or anything else including a club sandwich or a life-size doll sewn together entirely from chicken breasts. I really hope someone was promoted and then subsequently executed for ever coming up with this idea.
You wanna know how to "play" Photo Battle? Okay, first you and your friend insert 100 yen ($1) each. Then, you pick up your respective plastic cameras, which act as your "joysticks" for this particular recreation abomination. Then, omigoshacariszoomingacrossthescreenquicktakeapictureofit!!! Ohit'soutoffocustoobadyoulosepleaseinsert100moreyen!!!! GAME OVER. Gosh, wasn't that fun and exciting? Woo! What a rush! Anyway, I'll see ya later; I'm gonna go get addicted to heroin.
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Next up is Iron Chef: The Game, which differs from its TV show namesake in that instead of being fun and entertaining in a campy sort of way it is stupid and retarded in that move-the-plastic-knife-to-cut-red-LED-fish-in-predetermined-spaces sort of way.
This reminds me of all those cheesy movie tie-in games they'd make for the NES that featured the same basic plot as the movie on which it was based but also featured lots of other things that didn't happen in the movie like collecting different kinds of colored fruit and karate-kicking large tortoises in the junk to defend yourself. Like, you know how The Goonies the movie was a swashbuckling family adventure about the power of friendship and fighting for things that are important to you; but The Goonies the game was about navigating an albino dressed in only two tones of clothing towards skull-emblazoned bank vaults containing his similarly albino friends and finding the secret hidden raincoat so you don't lose health when hit by drops of falling poison water? Yeah, there's a similar relationship between the Iron Chef TV show and game. Except that The Goonies game, of course, fucking RULED:
Yes, I believe these Goonies will indeed be good enough. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.
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Next we have SEGA ROYAL ASCOT RACING II, which involves betting money not on real, live animals whose performances are dependent on any number of factors from diet to breeding to just plain luck, but on little plastic virtual horses whose performances are determined solely by a computer which perhaps not coincidentally is the very same computer that just took the money you bet on the aforementioned little plastic virtual horses.
...
...uh, yeah. Say, speaking of smart bets, let's go play hide-and-seek with a Cuban firing squad on a quota.
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This is the game with no name; a machine so awe-inspiring and intimidating that mere words could never accurately describe it. If it did have a name though, it would probably be "Mazan", because that's what's written on the side of it. Har!
Anyway, MAZAN is just like all those shooting games that are popular in American arcades, where a zombie ninja or something pops up and you aim your weapon at the appropriate section of screen to kill it. Except since we're in the Orient and all you use a plastic sword instead of a gun. Me, I think that's so cute. I can't say for sure but I imagine the weapon used for these games is changed to suit whatever country it's played in -- you know, like, in Australia, MAZAN comes with a boomerang and a can of Foster's, in Mexico you can't play the game because you have 17 children and no money, and in Canada instead of having an actual game cabinet there's a crushed carboard box with "MAHSAN" written on the side of it because fuck if they'd ever notice. And of course for Palestinian MAZAN you strap on a plastic vest and run into the screen as hard as possible.
...what, too soon?
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That brings us to our final game, whose name escapes me at the moment because my brain is hemmoraging just from looking at it. Now, don't let its looks fool you: despite its inviting, kiddy-game appearance, this innocent little horse-racing game can be quite a meat grinder. Seriously, it looks like it'd be really easy, since all you have to do is jerk the reins and move the horse with your body weight. But after about a minute of riding your forearms will first swell up like Popeye's and then fall off your body like a leperous Canadian province. Imagine squeezing 17 years' worth of forced mine labor into a two-minute span, and that about sums up how strenuous this little diversion can be. Of course, I get tuckered out from licking a Tootsie Pop, so don't take it from me. Take it from local chums Andy Smerczak-Zorza and Katie, shown in the following movie file demonstrating that even somewhat athletic-ish people can get tired out from this thing. Unless of course Smerzcak-Zorza's desperate butt-thrusting is a sign not of physical exhaustion and fatigue but of the deep haunting loneliness that comes with living in rural Japan. Hey, could be both.
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So now you've been walked through a Japanese arcade. Anyway, in conclusion? All of these games suck, are dumb, and should undergo fantastic impossible scientific procedures to turn them into human beings just so they can be shot. Seriously, am I the only one who misses games where your on-screen character would either cause or be killed by an explosion at least every 5 seconds? Yeah, always longing for simpler, more innocent times, that's me.
To start us off, here are some frightening mannequins from a department store near Sapporo station. The very concept of children needing to be fashionable is offensive enough without modeling said fashion on mannequins that will likely give said children horrible bloody nightmares for years to come. Perhaps this display is targeting the ever-lucrative "parents whose children whose minds have been raped and taken over by demons" market. Well, I guess if your kid is gonna have evil spirits exorcised from his body, he may as well look good doing it.
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Next we have the famed Sapporo TV Tower which, who am I kidding, you've never heard of and neither have I. All I know is that this, along with the Tokyo Tower, shows that Japan has some weird preoccupation with filling its country with miniature Eiffel Towers.
Speaking of preoccupations, on the right is the cartoon-ized, more marketable incarnation of the tower, illustrating another of Japan's obsessive compulsions: namely, the need to anthropomorphize EVERYTHING. Its name is "Terebi Tou-chan," 'terebi' being Japanese for TV, 'tou' being short for 'tower', and 'chan' being an affectionate, familiar form of the more well-known-thanks-to-80's-movies '-san'. In case you're wondering why the cartoon tower has a moustache, well, that leads us to a third relentless obsession of this country, puns. See, "Tou-chan" is also how one might refer to his or her own father; thus when you say "Tou-chan" it becomes hilariously difficult to determine whether you are talking about your father or merely expressing disturbingly affectionate feelings for a big ugly hunk of red metal sitting in the middle of Sapporo. Boy, aren't puns even funnier when someone tries to futilely translate them into another language?
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This is one of those moon-walk inflatable jumpy-thingies (way to describe, No-Describe) in the shape of 'Crayon Shin-chan,' a loveable children's cartoon character whose existence helps make my life as an elementary school teacher just that much more of a living Hell. I've seen Crayon Shin-Chan a few times myself, and I must say it's actually a pretty funny show. The six year-old title character talks like a pre-school yakuza member, cynically points out the immaturity of adults, and is known for such antics as pulling down his pants and drawing eyeballs below his bellybutton to make an 'elephant' (guess what body part serves as its trunk) and beating up bullies in the schoolyard with only his two independently moving buttocks. This was all of course very funny to me until I became a teacher, when it suddenly dawned on me that Crayon Shin-Chin is probably largely responsible for my students' altogether unhealthy preoccupation with their bathing suit areas.
On a side note, when trying to get into the Crayon Shin-Chan moonwalk -- of course I tried to go in there -- I noticed the only people in there were mischievous junior high school students having fun throwing each other around in there. I thought it would be great fun to go in there and bust their underdeveloped heads, but unfortunately my companions forbade me. My companions are BORING.
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Now, an intermission:
Moving right along...
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Okay, so the significance of this house, and why I am horribly embarassed to have actually gone visit it, will take some explaining so bear with me. So in Japan there's this insanely famous TV show called Kita no Kuni Kara ('From the North Country'), which has managed to become so thoroughly ingrained in Japanese pop culture mainly due to its unusual format, which sees the cast come together to make a TV movie once every two years, for I think a period of about 20 years with possibly more to come. When the series started out in the early 80's, the main character, Jun, was just a little boy, but when the last one (EVERY one is 'the last one') aired in 2003, he as in his mid-twenties. So essentially, Japanese television watchers over the past two decades have watched this little boy and his supporting cast literally grow up before their eyes, which probably explains why so many people have such an attachment to the series. Reportedly, when a new installment airs, the entire country practically shuts down for a day, as everyone is glued to their TV sets eagerly waiting to see what horribly melodramatic events Jun will get himself caught up in this time.
Me, I actually think the show is kind of neat, if for no other reason than the fact that the cute little boy that plays Jun grew up to be an awkward, lanky, and generally uncomfortable-looking person; a development which I suppose is completely unsurprising seeing as the kid basically went through puberty in front of the entire nation. Still, only in Japan could Kita no Kuni Kara's unique airing schedule work. I mean, if they tried something like this in the US, they'd have to tank the entire series as soon as the child star hit his teens and inevitably developed a drug problem and/or a warped sense of ego that led to his bringing impossible demands to the contract renegotiating table.
Anyway, if you haven't guessed by now that house in back of me is Jun's house on the show, which makes my actually visiting it an act equivalently geeky to signing up for a guided tour of The Brady Bunch house or something. Like...major uncool, man.
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This has no particular reason for being here, but I just kinda like this picture of Santa eating an ambiguously constructed sandwich for some reason.
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Lastly we have yet another characteristic trait of Japan: demeaning employees by making them dress up as giant fluffy mascots. In my cumulative three years in Japan I have been approached on the street by people dressed as giant hot dogs, giant cell phones, giant crepes, and giant cream puffs; as well as your standard generic, biologically vague mascots such as the one pictured above. This one was positioned in a shopping mall on "Children's Day," and there were parents lined up with their kids for hours simply for the opportunity to play rock, paper, scissors with that orange...thing. I'm not quite sure what the allure was myself. Maybe if you won, the creature magically gives you back all the time you wasted fucking standing in line just to play rock/paper/scissors with some idiotic college dropout in a big orange suit; I dunno.
Actually, my favorite mascot-related story comes not from this one, but from a few years ago when I spent a month
travelling around Japan. I think I was in a Hiroshima shopping street when I noticed some poor soul trapped in a giant, yellow inflatable outfit, looking much like Pac-Man but legally dissimilar enough from Pac-Man not to be Pac-Man. His costume was so big, literally almost twice my size, that he was completely blind, probably mostly deaf, and could barely even move; he had to be led around by another -- no doubt higher-ranking -- employee so as not to accidentally wander into a crowd of child nuns and crush them all to death with his giant yellow curse. The best part though, was that whenever his handler would turn away for a second, some high school kid walking by would invariably take that as his cue to punch this giant yellow defensely doofus as hard as he could, sending him stumbling and flailing down the walk trying to maintain his balance as best he could. Cruel, yes, but at the same time tragically hysterical; this poor guy trapped in what essentially amounted to a giant yellow sensory deprivation suit, unable to trust any of his senses and under attack from unknown assailants whose attacks could come from any direction, at any time. This isn't something you'll hear me say often, but man, high school kids rule.