I Can't Live Without my Radio

All tucked in? Heeeeere we go.

Once upon a time, not long ago, Japanese electronics ruled the worldwide marketplace.

It's true! Seriously! They were so renowned for their quality and sense of design that a little-known entrepreneur by the name of Steve Jobs visited Japanese factories in an attempt to figure out how to make his own company's computers more stylish.

They were so renowned for their sense of design, in fact, that a short-lived fad for plastic model kits of boomboxes and stereos actually swept the land. In a country with as much pocket money as Bubble-era Japan, it might seem odd that people would pay money for non-functional versions of things that they could actually purchase on store shelves.

But the yen was weak. Stereos were expensive -- the equivalent of hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars. Not to mention the small floorspace of many urban Japanese homes, which limited the amount of equipment even wealthy gear-heads could own. Aoshima included every tiny detail of the originals -- even little records to put on the turntables. 

So plenty of audiophiles suffered with cheap systems for actually playing music, while gazing at the tiny plastic scale representation of what they actually wanted to own. If you ever wanted a clear picture of how a bubble-era otaku spent his days, that is probably it.

Eventually, Aoshima ran out of consumer gear to portray and expanded into entire studio setups. "Hello FM-kun" replicated an actual radio DJ's setup -- perfect for those long afternoons spent listening to FEN. This one actually featured a light up "on air" lamp.

The Otocon series replicated a then-cutting edge karaoke setup -- so unrelentingly old-school it used tapes instead of laser discs. Otocon upped the ante with little working speakers that could be plugged into the headset jack of a "real" system and even included little cut-outs of hearthtrob Emi Kagami.

Of course, this being the Eighties and this being Japan, there was only one logical conclusion to all of this stereo madness: a stereo that transformed into a robot. Meet Popy's Compoboy. ("Compo" being the Japanese term for a compact stereo system.)

Conclusion: if Japan still produced things like this today, we'd all be listening to music on iCompoboys instead of iPods. 

Science dropped. Class adjourned.

(And thanks to machinesoldier for the Compoboy images!)

Comments

[Ryan]

"-- so unrelentingly old-school it used tapes instead of laser discs."

The analog carts and player in the DJ set up also marks this as an 80s/90s production (though I suspect some college radio stations are still using them.) I have no idea what some of the rest of that gear (for example the jukebox-looking thing second from right) is, though.

[MattAlt]

I think that's the storage rack for the (8-track?) karaoke cartridges.

Also notable is that this is the kind of karaoke setup where one has to perform in front of an entire bar/restaurant. Nobody outside of tiny "pub"/"snack" establishments (generally patronized by older folks) does it that way anymore; it's mainly private karaoke rental rooms these days.

[Steve Harrison]

So, more the setup the bar in the movie 'Black Rain' would likely have used?

And people pretend that movie was totally inaccurate in its view of Japan! :)

And I always thought Compoboy was a myth, vaporware, an illusion. So it really got made, huh? Wow. Wonder why that never got the Godaikin treatment?