AltJapan

Save the Earth

Forget the goddamn radioactive cows. Hiroko and I discovered this wedged between two rocks just off the coast of the Miura peninsula. Look familiar? Yeah, I thought so. Sure, he's small now, but in the blink of an eye:

I'm pretty sure this means we're all dead. Eventually. Or maybe not.

Yokai Karakuri

 

Two great tastes that go great together! Karakuri means "clockwork automaton" and yokai means, well, yokai! But it isn't every day that you get to read about both in the same article.

Every August, the city of Yokkaichi in Mie prefecture holds the Yokkaichi Matsuri festival, in which a massive clockwork rendition of a yokai called the Onyudo is rolled out for the crowds. The six-meter monstrosity, which is operated by a crew of people inside the figure, features swinging arms, tapping feet, and -- best of all -- a snake-like neck that extends the head out another three meters from the body, blinking and sticking out its tongue all the while. It's a Twentieth-century reconstruction of a karakuri that debuted in 1869, according to local sources.

Japan has a long tradition of clockwork automata performing in festivals, but few have survived into the modern era. Yokkaichi Matsuri is one of the few places you can see one today. The festival is held on the first Sunday of every August.

Hotaru no Hangout

The Washington DC area (where I'm spending a few days) has a bumper crop of fireflies this year.

Japan's Game Industry Ice Age

We Used to Be Number One. Why Did the Japanese Game Industry Crash and Burn? (2chan, Japanese Language)

The recent announcement of an IPO by online game giant Zynga has occasioned some serious soul-searching on Japan's notoriously frank 2chan bulletin board system. How did this relative newcomer to the gaming scene, whose products aren't even sold in stores, come to have a potential value of a billion dollars or more, while Japanese titans struggle to make their way in a rapidly changing industry?

Here's a selection of unvarnished opinions from the eternally pessimistic anonymous hordes, translated into English. 

The Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System) generation is in an ice age. Nobody has money or time for games. 

More accurately, everyone's outgrown games. Games are driven by kids. And Japan has fewer and fewer of those.

It's a total myth that Japanese shit ever dominated the world. All we have now is what we had then, which is beautiful little boys using swords and magic to fight sorcerers.

Ever since we abandoned PC games we've lost our technical skills, and now we're too far behind the curve to ever dig out.

It's because of the lack of any sort of educational path, and also because aside from a small portion of the industry, game company employees have no social standing.

We were never able to adapt to the shift to 3D and networked gaming is why.

Come on, now. The three top game companies in the world are Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Two out of three are Japanese. That ain't bad.

Yeah, but if this were the Nineties all three would be Japanese.

Dev costs are too high for small and medium sized players to compete anymore. 

It's the Wii's fault. Thanks to that system Japan's game developers were late getting on board with PS3. Unlike Level 5, a lot of makers couldn't easily make that transition.

SQEX is dead but maybe Sega and Konami and Nintendo still have life in them.

Sales figures haven't changed. What has changed is how good foreign developers have gotten.

The difference in technical abilities is just too obvious. Can any Japanese game company hope to compete with this? [Links to previews of "Uncharted 3" and "The Elder Scrolls V."] 

Will foreigners ever get tired of these super-realistically rendered games where all you do is race through shooting shit?

Hey, we're still number one in eroge (pornographic games!)