"Don't meet your heroes," they say.
1. Your heroes will not be who you think.
My favorite case of this is when
Richard Hammond met Evel Knievel, the jumping-over-things-on-motorcycles daredevil, in the senile twilight of his life. There may be no sterner warning on film.
2. Post Olympic Depression Disorder.
Likewise, living your dreams can be a dangerous thing. Gold medal winners are watched for depression after they've met their singular life goal. What next?
Worse still is when the living
of your dream is taken away from you. I've wanted to mention for months now that one of my favorite game designers, Warren Spector, had his dream of working for Disney
ripped away from him after his Disney game wasn't a runaway hit. Spector has been a
well-documented Disney freak his whole life. He was admittedly euphoric when the Mickey Mouse House bought his game studio and brought him into the fold. It must be devastating to be kicked back out of it. He's been silent in the press and on his blog since the studio closed early in 2013. I hope he's OK, and I hope he's working on something awesome.
I've said all of this to say that living in Japan has been something of a smaller version of that.
I didn't know it when I was younger, but I think at some point Japan became The Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I knew I wanted to learn everything there was to know about games, and Japan made all the games, so I needed to know the language to find my way around the world of games over there.
As high school progressed into college, teaching in Japan, grad school and going back to Tokyo, it's become apparent that I achieved the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I live and work in the city, I speak the language, I can move about somewhat smoothly, and I've even owned a Japanese market game console or two.
But times have changed.
In the last 15-20 years, the center of gravity of the gaming world has shifted west. Japanese to English localizations that used to take months or years now take days. And Japan
no longer has a lock on what made its games so great.
Your heroes will not be who you think.
Moreso
outside of gaming, times have changed. Quoth
Spike Japan, one of the more interesting Japan blogs, upon that writer's retirement:
I’m bored, to be honest, with Japan, the Japan of Abenomics and AKB47 [sic], of The Idolmaster and super-deformed anime, of bullying and territorial tantrums and constitutional revisionism.
I wrote in 2008 that I had lived the dream. There are taller mountains to climb - maybe Dragon Quest VII or Yakuza 5 in the original Japanese - but I lack the language skill or the interest in the game itself. I live in the Japan of Monster Hunter 3, Monster Hunter 3G, Dragon Quest, and microtransaction-driven collectible card games made for Android.
What now? Post-Olympic Depression Disorder.
That's not to say I'm depressed. 2013 has been very good to me. But I've climbed my mountains and, as far as Japan is concerned, wish to climb no more.
I spent much of 2012 being bothered by the "What now?" question. I'm no longer in a huge rush to get back Stateside - just a minor rush, say, in the next 2 years or so. So until it's time to make that move, I'm going to slow down a bit and enjoy Tokyo. More networking, more parties, and more gaming - probably in English.