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.
Japan may be a little too trusting on security issues. (I use "security" in the IT sense here: keeping the bad guys from doing things they shouldn't do.) At my local 7-11, when buying a beer, I was caught off guard when the typical mumbling cashier pointed to the LCD screen facing me and mumbled something I don't usually hear in the everyday convenience store cashier transaction. I still don't know what was said, but the idea was clearly to direct my attention to the screen.
The LCD, whose screen space is typically 80% ads / 20% running total, was replaced with a big dialog box with big red text.
After a paragraph of typical Japanese, lengthy, indirect politeness, the screen gets uncharacteristically direct. The text in red bluntly asks, "Are you at least 20 years of age?"
Putting aside the surprising issue of just asking someone if they're legal, there's an even bigger problem.
The connection - or rather, similarity - between Nintendo and Apple is incredible.
Here are a few choice quotes from Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic, one of the better Nintendo books from the last few years:
"I think they have a lot in common with us in that we both make unique, interesting products that surprise people. I really respect and think highly of Nintendo. I myself own a Gamecube and a Wii." -Phil Schiller, 2008
Apple takes pride in its software development, bringing new experiences to its customers on the twin pillars of hardware and software. On that count, it's certainly not unlike Nintendo. [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata himself agrees: "We want people to be surprised, and we want people to call our approach unique. That's what people say about Apple, too.
It's cherry-picking the numbers, but if you stack up quarterly sales numbers from 2005 through 2008 the lines are identical. Apple's are higher by a steady margin of about $3 billion, but the lines are identical in shape:
That's Apple on top, in black, and Nintendo below in grey, and me creepily peering around from behind the book
The quotes are endless about how either company wants to surprise people, or focuses on R&D heavily, or holds employees accountable, or how execs use each other's products, or has been to the brink of death and back, or has millions of people waiting with baited breath before product announcements.
My personal favorite common factor about the two companies is how both reach into their back catalogues of experiences and bring them back in unexpected ways. Roughly 48% of all media coverage of the iPad has referenced the Newton (a prototype PDA from 1993, pretty far ahead of its time). Other recurring themes include the Macintosh and iMac unveils, but you'd have to find a dedicated Apple fan to get you more examples than that.
I can give you some Nintendo ones, though. The 3DS is, in a sense, a refinement of the Virtual Boy that came about once the technology improved. Nintendo has some product failures, such as Virtual Boy, just like Apple had the entire 1990s and the Motorola ROKR. Products aside, Nintendo brings back some small details in very subtle ways. Check out this little tune, which was bundled with a DSiWare animation app called Flipnote Studio:
Seems innocent enough, until you find that someone snuck a very similar tune into a secret level of Super Mario 3D Land:
And it turns out that these little tricksters have a long history of doing this stuff. If you owned a GameCube, you may not have ever known that the calming ambient system menu music is actually borrowed from a Famicom (NES) accessory that never made it to the US:
Speaking of hardware that never left Japan, learning about Satellaview blew my mind. It was a SNES addon with a satellite modem that let players download small segments of Nintendo games and even play along with live broadcast audio tracks, creating a sort of Legend of Zelda-meets-radio drama kind of feel.
But the "download small segments of Nintendo games" is the big thing here. New bits of content for games like Link to the Past, F-Zero and Dr. Mario were created exclusively for the service. So, in effect, Nintendo was pushing the boundaries of what we now know as downloadable content and episodic gaming. In 1995. Here's a commercial, and even though it's in Japanese, you can get a basic idea of what's going on:
So in one corner you have Apple, which tried to take the computer mobile nearly 20 years ago with Newton and failed because the technology wasn't ready. And in the other you have Nintendo, which tried to reinvent gaming by way of connectivity over 15 years ago and failed because the technology wasn't ready (at least on the small scale of Japan, which didn't have terrestrial Internet in 1995). The ideas were always there, but the means weren't.
After being an Apple user for some five years, and having read Steve's bio, I'm finally coming around to understanding why someone would be an Apple fan, someone who follows the company out of something more than attachment to the products themselves, someone who sticks by in thick and thin.
I'm understanding it because I'm the same way with Nintendo, a very similar company.
Postscript
In all fairness, Nintendo didn't invent the gaming modem. The Sega Channel beat Nintendo to the punch in 1994, but the precedent for failed gaming modems goes back way further than I ever thought.
In fact, attempts at connected gaming go all the way back to the Atari 2600. If Wikipedia is to be believed, that failed attempt became the eventual core technology of AOL.
If Nintendo had to be 'first' at something in the field, it was the use of a broadcast satellite, although even the Golden Age-era consoles used cable TV to achieve much the same effect.
(On an aside from my aside, Ed Rotberg, the creator of Battlezone, even told me that gameplay analytics were thought of at Golden Age-era Atari but the machines needed modems to phone home. Does the gaming industry have any ideas that weren't originally thought up in the 1970s?)
And while I'm doing the errors-and-corrections segment, I may as well admit that the 48% statistic about Newton is totally made up.
There's a clip just like this one that was always used as B-roll footage when Japan was in the news every day at the end of the 80s. Sunset palette, city traffic, and those really boxy vans are really all I remember of it. It symbolized Japan's rise in the world, although I was still too young to make the connection between my beloved Nintendo and the nation of Japan - the economic juggernaut, the world power, the orderly society and the O.G. peaceful rise.
Still, there's something that that image triggers for me. For a native Japanese, it'd probably trigger nostalgia, if anything, for that brief moment when Japan sat at the top of the world. For me, well, it's almost nostalgic but never could be. How could I look back fondly on a time and place where I never lived?
That sense is probably why I loved Shenmue, an old Dreamcast game with a cult following that was known for its ahead-of-its-time open world more than the story, fighting or controls. Even though it hasn't aged well at all, at the time it felt like an incredibly realistic, explorable re-creation of a 1980s Tokyo suburb. Shenmue allowed me to visit this imagined place from the B-roll and see what it would have been like.
That sensation is also why I count Crazy Ken Band among my guilty pleasures. The song below, like most of Crazy Ken's, is itself an exercise in nostalgia: for summers past, for old Detroit muscle cars, for an older rock-n-roll sound, for youth, and always for an alternate-reality sort of Americana pinpointed to the sailor-filled port city of Yokosuka, where American influence has been heavy since the war. It may not be for the bubble heyday, but Crazy Ken acts the same in remembering an older Japan, mixing details real and imagined for a very specific feel.
The feeling is even why I love Sushiyama, a Dallas sushi restaurant that doesn't try to chase the chic, modern, date-friendly decor that so many American sushi joints go for. While the place is actually a tacky pseudo-Japanese mockup of a cozyizakaya, when I'm there I willingly buy into it and feel a little bit temporarily transported.
Between all the images of the country I've consumed over my lifetime, I think I've sort of created a false memory for myself that looks back fondly on a Japan gone by.
The Japanese have a word for nostalgia: natsukashii. But to put it as simply 'nostalgia' in English is a poor translation. In Japanese the word has a more specific, nuanced meaning that leans toward the emotions stirred up by recalling times past - which can be collectively shared, thanks to Japanese uniformity in experience.
Let me put it this way: if you say "that's so nostalgic" in English, someone could ask you for more detail. "Nostalgic for what?" you may be asked. But say it in Japanese - natsukashii desu ne - and the response will be more like "I know what you mean."
Oddly enough, this dude took a camcorder (VHS!) to Tokyo at the end of the 80s. For people who know the city, it's easy to recognize East Shinjuku in the video. It's amazing how little the area has changed in 20 or 30 years. So if Tokyo in 1987 was very nearly the same as it was in 2007, maybe my memories of the area at Japan's peak, false though they are, aren't so inaccurate.
I told Facebook (ie, my friends and loved ones) about a week or so ago, but I've more or less known I'd go for a while longer than that. It was really just a matter of reaching a particular level of certainty that crazy random twists wouldn't happen at the last minute.
I guess they still could happen, but at this point I'm OK with stopping the job search and turning down whatever leftover job search calls that trickle in. (Why do I care about this? About 48 hours before my first departure to Japan, back in '07, Google called completely out of the blue. Making that decision was agonizing and sleep-depriving.)
Where ya going?
So, for the handful of readers who haven't already been exposed to the news somehow, I'm headed to Rakuten, Japan's #1 in e-commerce. (That's pronounced 'rock-ten.') I'll start in April 2012, so I'll be moving at the end of March.
What're ya doing?
Honestly? I don't know. They'll assign me after a month of training. Could be their core e-commerce business, or it could be new lines of business (like Travel, Golf or Weddings!), or it could be international rollouts of existing products (how about Edy for your NFC money needs?), or it could be assisting in international acquisitions (which have happened so far in the US, UK, France, Russia and China by joint venture). They're a big company but still have room to grow at 7,000 employees (for comparison, Amazon has 43,000).
Are you nervous?
You mean about radiation? Not so much. I'm more nervous about leaving loved ones very far behind here in the US.
Are you excited?
Hell yes! A UT alum already working for the company was cool enough to reach out to me and tell me all about his experience. Seems like he's having a great time. When I was living and teaching in the boonies, I came to Tokyo to recharge my batteries. Now I'll live there.
Isn't it expensive? Are you making enough money to live on?
Tokyo housing isn't as bad as you may have been led to believe. I've found apartments online for about $1,000 a month in rent in awesome locations. Small, sure, but definitely not shoebox-sized. It'll be less if I let Rakuten set me up with housing. The company is located on the southern edge of central Tokyo, in Shinagawa. That's a major bullet train stop and is just around the corner from Haneda Airport, the swanky city one that just started taking international flights. I'll live somewhere roughly 30 minutes from Shinagawa. If I'm lucky it'll be in another big neighborhood such as Naka-meguro. Otherwise I'll just be a teeny-tiny bit closer to Yokohama: convenient to work but a little further from all the fun action.
For other money matters, Rakuten has free breakfast and lunch and pays for my commuting. I just need to pay for suits to wear!
What are you doing in the meantime?
I'm headed home to Texas to enjoy the winter at home, rent-free, with Mom. I'm going to miss California a lot but it'll be a good place for 4 months' downtime before things get crazy. Oh, also, I'm looking for an honest 4 months' work in Texas! So, uh, bring me in as a temp or something!
