Japan: Day One

There had been some confusion; something lost in translation, I suppose.

The three of us (me and the two girls I was travelling with) were supposed to have rooms booked – couch surfing to be exact – prior to arriving in Japan but, for whatever reason, it fell through. Our flight was Saturday morning and Friday afternoon I got a call from S. Every hostel/hotel/hole-in-the-wall she contacted was full. No room in the inn. She was obviously concerned.

But what can you do? We certainly weren’t going to cancel our tickets. Destiny isn’t going to be thwarted by so arbitrary a detail as a place to stay; things usually have a way of working out.

And there’s always park benches.

As it turns out we didn’t need to resort to getting our camp on. At the last moment S. managed to get us two rooms at a “capsule hotel”. The rooms where we stayed (the girls bunked together; I had my own pad) were little more than walk-in closets with capsules to sleep in. These capsules – just big enough to squeeze yourself into – were like hotel rooms in miniature: mattress, pillow, tiny TV, radio, climate control and reading light. (I looked but couldn’t find a Gideon’s Bible.)

Of course we had to find the place first. We took the train from Kansai International Airport to Shin-Imamiya Station near downtown Osaka. Somehow I wound up carrying most of our luggage.

Outside the station it reeked of piss and garbage. Not exactly a sketchy part of town (do those even exist in Japan?) but there weren’t rows of Ritz-Carlton’s or Hiltons lining the streets either. A whole fleet of bicycles locked up beneath the underpass; bodies at rest; chrome flashing and fading into shadow by turns whenever a train rumbled above us. Old men squatting over a game of “Go”; gambling, cursing and yelling. Vendors set up on the sidewalks hustling, hocking all manner of wares: household appliances; art; a prodigious selection of pornography; some vintage videogames.

It was this latter item (the games, not the porn) that caught my eye. I picked up a copy of “Dragon Quest V” for 300 yen (about three bucks.) Widely regarded as the finest 16-bit RPG to never receive an official English translation this title, originally published for the Super Famicom (SNES) in 1992, was only formally localized and released in America earlier this year. Until then getting your hands on a copy was something of a castle in the sky – or at least a very expensive purchase on EBay – for videogame collectors and aficionados. So I was thrilled to be making this (portentous as it would turn out) transaction.

The guy doing the selling – an older gentleman of few teeth and questionable odor – seemed awfully pleased with the sale so I thought I might’ve been had. But still, it would have only amounted to a couple of dollars so I couldn’t have been taken for too bad a ride. And more importantly: “Dragon Quest V”!

While I was all aglow with unabashed geekery the girls were in a Lawson’s trying to get directions to our hotel. A Japanese man very kindly offered to take us there. It was about a half block back up the street. We’d walked past it a couple of times.

After storing our bags the three of us decided to head to Namba, an entertainment district in downtown Osaka, for the night’s festivities. It was getting on towards dusk when we arrived and Namba was already a blazing Shrine to Neon. I thought they liked it lit up here in Korea but this was ridiculous; if I’d been a moth I would have probably just died then and there: sensory overload.

One of the things I was set on doing in Japan was getting in a few rounds of “Street Fighter IV”. I’ve already written at some length about my relationship with this franchise so I won’t rehearse that here but this has been a goal of mine for a while; to test my mettle against competitors who are routinely ranked as the best in the world. It isn’t a major goal, sure, but, like what Dr. Pausch recommended in his “Last Lecture”, it is an attainable one. And those are good to have; grease in the gears of bigger dreams.

The girls were pretty understanding the first couple of times I drug them into an arcade (they even played a sit down racing game) but this understanding was on the wane by arcades three and four. By arcade five I figured I’d be going it alone. But I was not to be daunted in my quest for a “Street Fighter IV” cabinet! Turns out five was my lucky number. The game was displayed on a big HD screen near the center of the arcade and all things considered I didn’t do too badly: I won six out of ten matches. There were slaps on the back; communal “oohhs” and “ahhs”; the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. An international brotherhood of geeks.

We had ramen for dinner: piping hot and incredibly delicious. If noodles have a Platonic ideal this was it.

What happened next was, for me, nothing short of phenomenal. However it involved vintage videogames. And I’m going to write about it now. At length. Certainly at more length than common courtesy would allow. So feel free to skip to the end if this isn’t your cup of tea.

[Begin Paul’s Epic no-wonder-I’m-thirty-and-unmarried Nerdsplosion]

The store was called “Big Tiger”.

Newer games on the first floor: this generation; PS2 and PS1; some GameCube games; a dusty and unloved Xbox in a shroud of bubble wrap stuffed in the corner. It was all interesting enough. But it was upstairs – up the Stairway to Heaven – where the real joys awaited discovery: used and new vintage.

The distinct sounds of popular Famicom (NES) games like “Super Mario Bros.” and “Zelda” played like a chorus of 8-bit angels as you ascended the stairway to the second floor. (If you grew up in the 80’s you’re probably humming these tunes right now. Amazing how Koji Kondo (the composer of many iconic videogame soundtracks, including the two mentioned above) was able to create such memorable music with such limited technology.) The walls were lined with posters of childhood favorites – Little Mac, Bonk, Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Quest” character designs – that blurred past like you were moving through a time warp.

And the games! It was like discovering a cache of buried treasure that I’ve been studying the map to for twenty years: Super Famicom games (boxed + instructions “Final Fantasy VI”?!); MegaDrive and PC Engine games and systems; every iteration of Gameboy from its monochromatic origins to the Technicolor sunset of its final version; the various armamentarium – plush toys, promotional posters, controllers and chords and carrying cases – of two and a half decades of videogame culture.

I purchased three MegaDrive games: “Phantasy Star II”, “Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium”, and “Shining and the Darkness”. All three were had for just over 500 yen.

The first two were largely the creation of Rieko Kodama. Although not as well known a figure – either in her native Japan or abroad – as, say, Shigeru Miyamoto, or even Hironobu Sakaguchi, her works (mostly videogames) are well-loved by those familiar with them and she has had a big, if largely unheralded, influence on the role-playing (RPG) genre.

The “Phantasy Star” series (specifically the numbered entries; that is, not the on-line iterations) is, for a number of reasons, my all-time favorite videogame series.

Back before Blockbuster gobbled it up there was a little Ma and Pop video store in my old hometown called “Showcase Video”. The guy who ran the place – an obese loudmouth whose fingers and shirt were always stained with popcorn grease – was a real unpleasant dude, but Showcase was they only store in town that rented SMS games so he had me by the short and curlies.

It was $2.99 for the weekend and you had the game till five the following Monday. (And that was five pm on the dot. Even a minute over and you got slammed with an extortionate late fee. I remember my Dad shouting this usurious racket down more than a few times.) I was too young yet to be working (mowing lawns was still a few summers away) and cash on hand was a rarity so I didn’t get to rent a game every weekend, but when it did happen it was a real treat.

And of all the SMS games I rented (and I think I eventually rented them all) “Phantasy Star” was tops.

The game itself was pretty revolutionary. One of the earliest console RPGs it featured a massive quest and pseudo 3-D dungeons that pushed the SMS’s technology to the limit. At barely ten years old, however, I wasn’t aware of the game’s historical or technological significance. All I was aware of was how much ass it kicked.

I’d never played anything like it. This game was wholly unlike the run-jump-rinse-repeat platformers (think “Super Mario Bros”) I was familiar with: there was very little action; I spent a lot of the game walking around talking to townspeople; when I would finally sally forth from the city limits I’d usually end up getting slaughtered in short order by a giant bee or grasshopper or some other angry insect; I was constantly getting lost with no idea how to progress. And it was a totally engrossing experience. It certainly didn’t hurt that Reiko Kodama’s character designs paid more than a little homage to “Star Wars”, a franchise I was – surprise, surprise – pretty into at the time.

Just before Showcase Video was finally vaporized by the Blockbuster Death Star in the late-nineties they had a going out of business sale. It’d been years since I’d been in there; I doubted if they’d even still have SMS games on the shelf. But they did. And in one of the most memorable purchases of my life I asked the owner (no longer the obese and draconic man of my youth but now his equally obese and draconic son) if he’d take a five spot for “Phantasy Star”. “Yea, whatever”, he said. “It’s not like anyone plays that old shit anyway.”

And now I can add the Japanese copies of “Phantasy Star II” and “Phantasy Star IV” to my collection of old shit. Awesome.

What a place was “Big Tiger” and how appropriate that it should be named after an animal that, through the fiction of Jorge Louis Borges, has come to represent the magical and unattainable – childhood in retrospect – to me.

It is a rare thing when the dream isn’t outstripped by reality.

[End Paul’s Geektastic Excersise in New Games Journalism]

I met back up with the girls at close to eleven o’clock. (Clearly they weren’t about to have anything to do with my weepy trip down memory lane.) We decided to finish the night up at “Sex Machine”, a BBQ dive-cum-James Brown shrine. The Godfather of Soul in the form of cut-outs plastered to the walls, a passable likeness in oil paint done by one of the stores proprietors, and a miniature wooden effigy among other relics, was there to preside over the serving of cold beers at a reasonable price.

You can’t make a place like this up.

Outside a trio of call girls were seeing their johns off from the love motel above us; inside the place throbbed to sixties rock and roll, soul, and jazz. James Brown and jazz, hookers, Japan on a Saturday night: I was ready at any minute for one of Murakami’s protagonists to enter the bar looking for a missing cat or girlfriend.

After some brief taxi tribulations (what trip to a foreign land would be complete without it?) the three of us decided to call it a night and headed back to the capsule hotel. It had been a busy day and Kyoto was the plan for tomorrow.