Some worthless images

I don't have anything major to add from recently. So let's just look at some photos together.


Are you comfortable?

I live in a country where dry-cleaners give you profound messages.

But proof-reading goes out of the window when it comes to multi-million dollar acting productions.

A country where I couln't get on the train at 01:04am because there literally was no space left.

It's no wonder people keep on losing their dogs. And wives.

I like Taraco. In pasta. On toast. Even in rice balls. But, when its six in the morning and it so blatantly looks like what it is - a full fish ovary - I have to decline. Can't they just mash it up like everyone else? One thing the Brits are very good at is making meat and fish look like it was never a living thing (or was born shrink-wrapped).






Do you have any lovely photographs? If you do, please, do send them to me. I probably can't remember what you look like anymore.

The MASSIVE Update Part 1 - the deepest well

It's funny how hard it is to blog when a) you have a full time job and b) you don't have Internet at home.



In the end, I have decided to satiate the quenchless thirst of my two's of fans who have demanded a recommencement of my blog.



Without any further excuses then. Let's proceed.





So, I have been working at my new job now for two months. The job that saved it all, and sparked a series of chaotic events that have changed my life pattern in MASSIVE ways (the title has many readings, like an overtly generic kanji).



I've decided not to talk about intimate work-related details on the blog. In fact, I'm not even going to say who I work for. I'm a coward like that. If you want to know, you can always ask me. In fact, if you're reading this, then you probably know already.



I received the job title of 'Overseas Business Manager', and I basically oversee all communications with our overseas clients. Now that quirky, casual games are all the rage, we have come into huge demand, so it's a great time to join the company. I think we are going to succeed quite a lot.



Back in the day, I encountered a lot of frustration applying for all the big companies - Konami, Capcom etc. How lucky I was. How strange fate is. In many ways, my job is perfect. We are not bound by many of the usual problems that beset most Japanese companies. The boss is very forward-thinking, and likes to show trust in his junior employees - he always sits at the back of the room in meetings. There is no "working your way up the ladder" in this company. I am allowed as much freedom and responsibility as is necessary. I feel that my input helps, and I really believe that things are about to go well for us.



I work in Aoyama, which is trendy and nice and the sun always shines. Our office is cosy and colourful, like a designer playpen. I work in a room where everybody except me has had a professional record contract. Or still has one. We rarely work overtime. Sometimes we play with robots.



Yeh, good times.


But anyway.

I'm starting to think that life is like a tripod. It has three legs.

Work.

Love/friendship.

Self.

If one of these is failing, you will wobble a bit, but you can survive. It will eat away at you slowly though.

If two of them fail, you will crash down into depression.

If three of them are buggered, then well, so are you.



Finally, I have one solid leg. The work leg. It is a good leg, and strong, and I'm glad that it's finally there.



With this leg in place, I recently kicked out another one that had been withered down by time. I ended my 4 year relationship with my girlfriend. A most complex affair. Sometimes I wonder if it was the right decision - or if I had made her a scapegoat for all my own problems. For sure, she supported me steadfastly through thick and thin. But now that it's over, there is definite relief. It was a relationship where I felt myself weakening, withdrawing into a shell. I was losing self-respect, and because of that, I was very nervous around new people. Heck, even people who I had know for a year or two. This was a leg of the tripod that was getting so big, and so demanding, that I was sacrificing myself for it.

Hmm, well, I was hoping to find a way to describe this event without looking selfish, but maybe there just isn't one.

We all have to make difficult decisions from time to time.

I had been postponing this one for some time. Maintaining the status quo helps no-one in the long term

It got to the point that even TV shows seemed to holding hidden messages for me. Even Peep Show was giving me relationship guidance.



Two weeks on, I feel better. I'm starting to adapt. Last week was golden week in Japan. Lot's of days off. It was not a good time to have days off. I mostly sat there on my sofa trying to get my head around things.

Luckily I have a very big head, so I'm pretty much stabilised now. I still have the odd wonky patch though.



So. That's one leg of the tripod gone. What of the final one? What of the self?



Things are looking up for the self. It is time for, "the era of self".

Some people - or - well- just my brother - would argue that this era has actually spanned my entire life. But to be honest, I've been feeling like I've been fading out the past few years. I was being watered down. It was easier to drink, but not as tasty.



The first step to this new era was acquiring a new apartment. Wow, seems like a long time ago already. I thought that moving house would be fun, but in truth it was hugely stressful. Because of this I didn't think too much about the break-up until after it had happened, and yes, I was shell-shocked for all of Golden Week.



But I did it. I pulled through all the obstacles. I leaped over the racist barriers. I sidestepped the financial pitfalls. But know I have a pretty sweet apartment to show for it, and not much left to stress over.



Arranging an apartment as a single foreigner with a Japanese estate agent is. very. hard. Most people turn you down flat before they have even met you. A state of affairs that would be deeply illegal in my country. Whilst it may be true that there are numbers of foreigners who do bad stuff - are noisy, do not pay their last month's rent etc - to refuse someone else because of this perception is straightforward discrimination. And the government do nothing to protect us, even though it's endemic in this country. If they want to start becoming more international, then hey, here's somewhere to start.
End of rant.



The moving day was also extremely tough. My friend Matt and I hired a truck and did it ourselves, saving hundreds of pounds. I will forever be indebted to him for this - it was a massive undertaking and a huge favour; more than we anticipated. My new apartment is on the 4th floor, with no elevator. My three-seater sofa was a nightmare. As was the book shelf, and my limitless hordes of stuff. I wish I could throw things away. I just love stuff so much. Why do I need three Neo Geo Pocket Colours? Maybe some day, the answers to all these mysterious questions will become obvious.

Crashdown - April 28th

I was very doubtful that I'd be able to fit so much stuff into my two-room apartment... did I manage it? Or do I have to sleep on the toilet now?

All challenging questions, that will be addressed in Part 2 tomorrow! Don't worry, there will be more positive things in that one.

Dormant SNES stalks convenience stores across Tokyo

I was in a Lawson convenience store near Tamachi the other day when I saw this:

4 years in Japan, and I never noticed these before

A SNES dashboard. Hmm.

It was a part of this beast;

Is anyone else disturbed by this?

Loppi is basically a mini Box office machine. You can buy tickets for concerts, museums, theme parks etc. there. I was buying tickets for the Gibli museum.

A quick internet search turned this up: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/nom/0011/index.html

Seems that this has been around since 2000, with 163 SNES titles available, and Gameboy games too! You ask at the till and pay per 10 minutes. I wonder if they still work? Has anyone out there had any luck? I flipped the power switch, but there was no sign of life. I didn't have time to ask the staff about it. That's my excuse, anyway.

Invest your cash NOW!

Hey, you!

Yeh, YOU!

...

You wanna buy a house?

Heh, have I got a sweeeeeet deal for yous!

Yes, I do!

Because, !!!breaking news!!!, some are being built right outside my apartment right here in mega-trendy-glitzy-wow-wow Kita-ward Tokyo!

Using hyper-space reduction technology, they have managed to fit 8 houses
into an area the size of two tennis courts! I'm not even kidding!
Light sources and any evidence of nature were the first to bite the bullet

That's right, for just JPY 45800000 - that's about GBP 200,000 - you can have your very own glorified box-for-living-in!

*pauses for applause*

That's right, you will be able to scoff at your friends plight as they live out their days in landlord-owned apartments when you own the 3 floor - that's right, 3 floor townhouse!!!

Walls are constructed using thin slabs of plywood not unlike the ones I used to use
to build miniature houses for Games Workshop board games - life imitating art indeed

Each house is made of 100% real wood! Not real as in part of a tree, but as in reconstituted wood (like a Chicken McNugget). Stop wasting time and money with trendy house-building fads like insulation (hah!), load bearing walls (scoff!) and earthquake-proof materials (peh!). We got the real deal here! Each house is designed so that once a big earthquake strikes Tokyo, The entire house will break apart effortlessly into its original flat-pack furniture state using real world physics!! This way, you can load your house onto a truck and reconstruct it in some prime refugee-camp real estate before everyone else has even pitched a tent!

But don't get too hasty, licking your lips in anticipation of the day the big 'quake comes - first, any earthquake will have to get past these brutal defenses!!

We have employed models to demonstrate that contrary to popular belief, Japanese homes do have
rooms big enough to accommodate a sleeping human being without having to stand up!

Yes, we managed to find some really big screws in the DIY shop that will fit snugly into the wooden beams that hold up the house! Can you see any non man-made power getting through these metal defenses? Me neither!

Ok, I know what you're thinking - "Ok, I agree - wood is the future of construction in earthquake prone countries - but won't it get all soggy when it rains? Or what happens if a meteor hits the outside of the house? Won't it catch fire and experience minor scolding?"

It's a good point. First, let me just remind you that we are talking about reconstituted wood, not real wood. When you see those big Australian bush fires on TV, that's real wood. Reconstituted wood is basically super-wood. It's man-made.
Of course, we could just leave the house as it is - but - as an added FREE bonus - we are going to glue some fake-stone panels onto the outside of the houses!

Have you ever seen a real brick that long? Of course not!
By using fake bricks, we can make them look up to a meter long!

These seem to be made of a similar material to real bricks, but crucially they have all the warm, cosy appearance of real bricks, without any of that "structural integrity" nonsense!

Japanese rooms aren't measured in meters, or inches, or any silly rule invented by foreigners. Rather, they are measured by how many tatami-mats you can fit into the room.

About 20% of the house's volume is composed of stairs!
Experts say that 95% of a family's most cherished memories are linked to stairways somehow

Perhaps the text is too small to read, so let me just tell you now... the second floor has a "Living-Dining Room-Kitchen" room that is 11.9 tatami mats in size! Wow! You could almost fit 12 tatami mats in there! Don't worry though - none of the rooms will have tatami anyway, they will all have (fake) fake wood flooring (as in not reconstituted wood, but plastic sheets made to look like wood).

So, come along NOW and buy one whilst you can!! You will almost certainly spend the rest of your life in this house! After all, Japan is obsessed with new homes, so no-one is ever going to buy it off you second-hand, and certainly not at anything better than half price. You may not even legally own the 10x5 meters plot (better check with the estate agent on that one!).

Please send your credit card details, plus a letter or permission stating that a) you are a moron and b) you will not try to sue me when your dreams are shattered by wafer-thin realities.

Best regards,

Nyago real estate - "Because a Japanese man's home is his prison"

Getting ready for Wii

This week, I got paid quite a bit more than I was expecting by a couple of my agencies, just two days before the release of the Nintendo Wii... a sign? Of course it is! I came to Japan to experience things like this, so why not :-P

Anyways. Started off pretty well, got to Yodobashi Akihabara at 7:30pm, and saw a sign that says that the queue starts at 8pm. There weren't too many people around, apart from some obligatory homeless dudes out to make a quick buck:



There didn't seem to be any of the madness and humming throngs that accompanied the PS3 launch, for various valid reasons (lower retail price, more units available). So, I went and, sniff, parted company with my little-used Gamecube, for a paltry 15 pounds... oh well... with Gamecube playback functionality built into the Wii, the console is pretty much obsolete, so I was happy to get anything for it.

So, I went for dinner with gaming friends Tim and Rudy, bog standard family-restaurant fare, in the ubiquitous restaurant 'Gusto', our typical haunt. The waiter was even more patronising than usual, repeating our order to us 3 times, and... get this... speaking to us in CASUAL Japanese! The horror! Damn his unorthodoxy!

We returned to the Yodobashi store at about 10:30 to get in line... but were greeted with silence, and this sign:


Egads! Why, cruel fate, must you cheat me of my most cherished Wii?
Instead of having people line up all night, they gave out tickets to those in line (much like the ones you get when you go to the deli counter in the supermarket), and told everyone to go home. Then you could just get some sleep and come back at 7am, no fuss, no pushing and screaming like at the PS3 launch.
Our grand plan for the day was to go to the Premiere of Casino Royale in the glorious Roppongi hills cinema, and then line up and get a Wii. Things were not quite going to plan.

Luckily, the story has a happy ending. AKihabara is just 15 minutes walk from Ueno, where there is also a Yodobashi store, albeit much smaller. So I got a ticket! Lucky! It actually worked out quite well - Ueno is closer to my home, and there were hundreds less people in line, meaning that we won't have to wait as long to get the goods come morning...
Happy days.


Well, needless to say, the rest of the day was pent in child-like glee. Nothing quite beats the ceremonial unwrapping of a new console (for the record, the Wii is immaculately parceled).