Tokyo Blog

It’s nearly the end of the year, and like most people I’m gearing up for the following one. After getting through a busy year with the aid of Muji notebooks and iCal, I’ve decided to go completely analogue for 2010 with a Moleskine diary, or schedule as the Americans will recognise it by, or possibly techou if your Japanese. So basically you’ve got several different formats of time-based notation throughout (but I got the one with the weekly format), with national holidays for every country in the world, time zones, measurement conversions, phases of the moon, timetabling, a matrix showing the distance between any two of the world’s major cities, a ruler, dialing codes, domain suffixes (internet TLD) a separate leather-bound notebook, a thinner notebook with customisable tabs, perforated tear-outs for giving details, icon stickers for weather, birthdays, events and so-on (you can just go ahead and stick them on a particular day or you can use the worded stickers to customise tabs in the notebook). It’s impressive because it’s pretty compact too. I know I recommended the Hobonichi Techou last time I talked about getting a diary, but I also recommend this one from Moleskine now too.

My Father is restoring a pre-war Riley Special, which is an British vintage car. He’s been doing this since before I was born, but this project is particularly special because he’s not just building one, he’s building five. This will be the first time my Dad’s process has ever been documented and will show you all the individual steps that are involved in taking the decomposed remains of a car dating back to the 1930′s and making it look like it just rolled out of the factory. Personally, I can’t wait to see the first one finished but you can read about it now and see the progress in ‘real time’ over at his Riley restoration diary blog.

I’m long overdue in doing this, but just a short note to let readers know, I’m moving the RSS and Atom feeds over to FeedBurner from now. You shouldn’t have to do anything, you should be redirected to the new feed automatically. If that doesn’t happen, don’t worry, the feed will continue to update with new posts, whatever happens.

Threadless have been making amazing T-Shirts for ages now. I even had a go at designing one myself, but it didn’t get printed! Now they’ve teamed up with Twitter to create a new line, in which people’s tweets get printed onto T-Shirts based on the number of votes they get from users. This news coincides with my own decision to finally join Twitter. I was totally against it for the longest time but pressure from peers has made me buckle. You can follow me: Tokyo Blog on Twitter. This blog is where the real meat will be found, but if you care about what I’m having for lunch or what trainers I’m wearing on that particular day…

Gashapon are small toys or novelties dispensed from vending machines here in Japan. They usually pop out in plastic ‘eggs’ and it’s completely random as to which one you’ll end up getting. Me and Mike piled numerous yen into a Gasha in Akihabara in order to get our hands on these mario trinkets. We got blocks, ghosts and shells in abundance, but didn’t get any power-up mushrooms or drain pipes. There’s no Mario in the collection by the way, which I thought was weird, but I’m happy just to get these to use as ornaments. They also double up as mini money boxes – useful for all the un-spendable ¥5′s and ¥1′s cluttering up my jeans.

I picked up these two beauties the other day. The orange one is the Sobu Line watch and the other is for the Yamanote Line. They only cost ¥500 each, and show a list of the station names along the length of the strap. They’re pretty bad quality as they’re so cheap, but I’ve been looking for a brightly coloured plastic watch for ages and being able to check the stations on the JR lines and see the time simultaneously can’t be bad.

These monks walk very slowly, exercising, or showcasing, their mastery of the zen principle of self control. Every next step is preceded by a quiet sounding of the small bell they carry in their right hand, the bowl in which they collect contributions gripped in their left. I’ve never seen anyone actually give a contribution to these buddhist monks. When I saw this one, I wanted to give him some money, but as so often in Tokyo, I found myself worrying about misunderstanding something and causing offense (how much do you give a takahatsu begging monk anyway?).

Intelligence: 8
Stamina: 7
Speed: 1
Resistance to Alcohol: 1
Sleeping Ability: 6
Combat Skill: 1
Voice Volume: 1
Magic Points: 9
Gold: 2

Train Through Tokyo II from Stephen Smith on Vimeo.

This is a video I shot during a train ride from the center of Tokyo to the airport (1hr 20mins or so away). It gives a good impression of the Tokyo cityscape, the buildings, logos and colours of the city rushing by. There’s also a few more videos from this series on my Vimeo.

As part of my continued effort to involve myself in as much of Japanese culture as possible (both traditional and contemporary), I went to my first baseball game last week! I went to a stadium near omotesando in the heart of Tokyo called Jingu Kyuu-Jou, home of the Yakult Swallows, where they took on the Chunichi Dragons from Nagoya – and lost. Still had a good time though. Between bouts of shouting and singing, I found time to snap a few photees, gobble a bowlful of steaming Udon, and knock back 4 draught beers. Especially for the occasion, I was sporting a Yakult Swallows jersey bearing the legendary Aoki’s name across the back – thanks Erica!

It’s that time again, when the inhabitants of Tokyo gather in their millions underneath the cherry blossom (sakura 桜) trees to celebrate the arrival of spring and the departure of winter. The tradition, known as Hanami (flower viewing) has been practiced for many centuries, and has evolved into the festival event it is now, with street performers, food stands and rawkus behaviour. Employees of individual companies, groups of friends, or family members will get together at this time of year to eat and drink outside in the ubiquitous parks and gardens of Tokyo. I was in Ueno park yesterday for a bit, to experience the madness, but now is only the beginning of Hanami, so I’m sure there will be a few more stories to follow over the next fortnight.

This is what it looks like as you exit Inaricho Sta. at around 5.30am after staying up all night in Shibuya. I’d forgotten I’d taken this picture. I just found it in my camera. The wind is pretty strong in Tokyo at the moment, and it blows into the entrances and exits of the metro stations. As your walking out feeling delicate after not sleeping, or having just woken up after half-an-hour’s sleep on the train, it chills you to the bone. I’ve done a lot of not-sleeping recently, and I’ve also got into the habit of sleeping on trains in the early hours of the morning and riding past my station, out into the suburbs and beyond.

Did you know there was such thing as a U.F.O Catcher expert? Well, apparently there is, and in these videos via Japan Probe, they show some special techniques in acquiring prizes from these usually frustrating video arcade attractions! I thought it would be relevant as I mentioned the U.F.O. catchers in my recent post about my hunt for Street Fighter IV in the game centres of Akihabara.

Before I returned home to the UK for christmas, I went shopping in my neighbourhood of Kotobuki for Christmas presents. My neighbourhood is famous for, amongst other things, toy companies and toyshops. You can see the famous Bandai HQ from my balcony. As it was, most of the presents I bought turned out to be Japanese toys. The best thing I bought turned out to be a Kendama, which is a traditional Japanese ball and string game with a body of wood shaped like a hammer on which you can balance the ball on 3 points, as well as a spike on top, which you can also get the ball onto (if you’re extremely good). You start with the ball hanging on the length of string and then you jerk it up and catch it on one of the cups on the hammer. You can then flick it up again and rotate the hammer to switch to a different cup, then the spike and so on. You can make up your own combinations, and even balance the ball on other parts of the hammer, like the angle of the cross formed by the intersecting pieces of wood. Modern kendama experts have gone even further than this, and switch between holding the ball and catching the hammer to visa versa and so on – even doing tricks where you swing the ball and hammer simultaneously like nunchaku, then catch the ball or hammer in differnet ways. So now I’m in training to become a more competent Kendama slinger. Check out the pros on YouTube.

As promised, I hit the streets of Tokyo to find a video arcade that had the new Street Fighter 4. The obvious choice of starting place was Akihabara, or Electric Town as it is also known, a mecca of otaku culture bristling with pachinko parlours (パチンコ店 / パチンコ屋) and video arcades (ゲームセンター) as well as, of course, the myriad consumer electronics stores.

I first arrived at Taito Station, the most likely place to find the newly released machines.

This place has 6 floors of gaming with a different type of machine on each. On the ground floor (known as the 1st floor in Japan) they had the UFO catchers, and on the floor above they had the photo sticker machines (プリクラ / プリント倶楽部), and above that the dance and music games, and so on.

On the ground floor though, they also had a floor guide at the foot of the escalator.

So it wasn’t difficult to find (thankfully I knew the location of this flagship game centre because I had been here before). I made my way through the building via two escalators and an elevator from the 3rd floor to reach the 5th, which is easily my favourite floor because it has all the beat-em-ups.

So here they were. A bank of 8 newly released SFIV cabinets.

It wasn’t busy because it was in business hours, but there were a few guys in suits on the far side and a couple of guys on my side. The Japanese cabinets only accommodate 1 player per machine, but if a player starts a game on the machine opposite yours, you have to fight against each other in 2 player versus mode! This is a great idea as you can have way more 2 player battles, and against complete strangers. I gave someone the Ken treatment and I could see him out of the corner of my eye afterwards, peering around the machines to get a look at who beat him. This adds a new kind of dynamic to the whole idea of arcade games, and I like it! 2 player bouts are always more enjoyable than fighting the CPU.

The characters were cleared easily, but the end of game boss, Seth, ate a couple of credits. I gave up after that and went home. I wasn’t about to waste any more money, so I made my way back downstairs to the front of the arcade.

Outside, I found this interesting machine facing out onto the street.

This is Taito’s Space Invaders 30th anniversary novelty called ‘The Happy Button’. The idea comes from the playing style adopted by most players of space invaders, one of the few games to feature backing music consisting of only 3 notes, which is to pound the fire button constantly in the hope of hitting an invader. All you have to do is press start and you get the countdown 3,2,1 before you have 10 seconds to hit the button as often as possible. I gave it my best Track n’ Field vibro-arm and got a pretty poor 81 presses. Such a simple idea, but it’s hearing the legendary missile sound FX again that makes it all worth while. After two worse attempts, I cycled home.

When I was in England over Christmas, I saw some old photographs that reminded me of a computer my parents bought me when I was younger. It was the mid to late 80′s and I was probably around 9 or 10 years old when I got my first computer, this Oric 1 you can see above the text. Compared to all the breeze-block fashioned personal computers of the time, I think this was a design icon. Smaller and thinner than its counterparts and packing the same sound card as the one found in the Atari ST.

The computer used to be kept on a drawer that slid out from the video cabinet beneath the TV. In order to use it you had to squat or kneel in front of it. I used to play Hunchback or Zorgon’s Revenge when no-one was using the TV, or try to program it by guessing at the syntax. Zorgon’s Revenge used to give me the creeps in much the same way as Quo Vadis and Jet Set Willy. The games themselves were very surreal, and when you mixed this with the garish graphics and garbled, contorted sound there was something disturbing about it. A bit like the old Vectrex at my nan’s house.

I experimented with many of the early personal computers during the 80′s. My friends all had a different one: an Acorn Electron, a VIC 20, an Acorn BBC, a Dragon 64, an Amstrad, Commodore 64. They all sucked, but without them I probably wouldn’t be where I am now, so I have a right to be sentimental.