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from the tim rogers archive: 02082003
I'm still homeless, only now I'm homeless within the confines of Shiki, Saitama, Tokyo, Japan's Manga GeraGera comic and internet cafe. From outside, where it is cold, the place looks like this. It's the place on the near-upper-right with the picture windows. Inside, you should be able to see some bookshelves. The view to my direct right is this. For copyright reasons, I can't show you my computer screen, on which I am playing Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball on a Microsoft Xbox. I was thinking of writing up a review for this game. I don't think I will. I think I'll just go sleep over here.
It's odd, when I sleep in those chairs. I always pick up a volume of Hirohiko Arakai's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and then don't read it. I feel some kind of strange connection with Mr. Araki -- maybe because we both share the same birthday -- June 7th. His June 7th is 1960. Mine is 1979. Still, we share a bond, so I hold his comic books while I sleep.
(author's note: I'm rereading this for Brandon's upcoming Japan feature on June 7th, 2003. My 24th birthday, and Mr. Araki's 43rd. Reading tihs instead of being taken out to dinner or a movie or anything. The hell.)
I can't tell you much about Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. I've been playing it for -- what, six hours over the last two days? Yet there's nothing much I can really say about it. All I'll tell you is that it's a lot like being homeless in an internet cafe. And no, I don't mean the near-unbearable wall of cigareete smoke, or the god-awful doorbell that squeals whenever the elevator door opens. Just that playing it, with my Sony Eggo headphones on, makes me very aware of my situation. I have a glass of ice-chippy Suntory ginger ale by my left hand, and a computer mouse by my right. To my left is a girl with what look like cell phone ornaments hanging from her ears. It is two-thirty in the morning, and I'm tired, both of Tecmo and of being awake, and of cigarette smoke.
There's a "no smoking" sign above each computer terminal. The girl with the earrings is smoking anyway.
I just spent a hundred yen on a bag of powdery donettes that leave a chalky residue on the roof of my mouth.
The way the Shiki Manga GeraGera internet and comic cafe works is this: you get off the elevator, you come in, and you state your purpose to the guy behind the counter. Yesterday night, he was reading the new Shonen Jump. Today, it was some fashion magazine. There's a girl around tonight. She has an apron, and looks sad. You tell one of these sad people if you want to pay by the hour -- 380 yen an hour -- or if you want to put down the cash for a "night pack" -- 980 yen for six hours, and then 300 yen each additional hour. I go for the night pack.
At the Manboo! cafes in Shibuya or Shinjuku, you pay 1080 for a night pack of seven hours. The first hour of the hourly rate is 100 yen, says the sign -- and then there's a nearly unreadable little font: "dansei: 200". "Men: 200." So they're reducing the price only for the girls. Is this a cheap advertising anti-gimmick, or kind of clever? As Shigeru Miyamoto's Pokemon was designed, many theorized, to get the Japanese people playing games together, was the 100-yen-for-girls fee intended to bring more females to internet cafes?
Do we need more females here? There's only one that I can see. The rest are men who either missed trains or don't want to go home, in suits, smoking, and playing games.
I just got back from another ginger ale run. It's not sweet enough, so I brought plenty of sugar packets to supplement my need-for-glucose. On my way back, I saw that the girl is playing Bomberman on PlayStation. Which version, I can't tell. The guy to my right, in a suit that suggests he should be checking email, is playing that new-ish super-futuristic Goemon game that came out for PlayStation last year. I feel kind of hi-tech with my Xbox booth.
Speaking of Xbox booths: up until about two weeks ago, I was living in an Xbox booth in AsoBitCity in Akihabara. It was nice. The walls were green Plexiglas, and almost soundproof. There was a sign above the giant plasma TV screen that said "Ojiyuu ni asonde kudasai!" "Please Play Freely!" So I played freely. The game was Steel Battalion. The sound was full surround. I wish I had a place to live, and a job, so I could afford these things for my home.
Speaking of booths in general: Manboo, the leading proprietor of Tokyo internet cafes, doesn't know how to spell the word. On the map at the front of every location, the regions of booths are labeled: "Single Boose"; "Pair Boose"; "Group Boose"; "Open Boose". It's a shame that a place with so many booths doesn't know how to handle talking about one.
Manga GeraGera, a low-fi alternative to Manboo, is entirely open booses. This allows in all kinds of cigarette smoke. If I'd had the energy to walk down to Ikebukuro tonight, I would have spent my evening in the Ikebukuro Manga Hiroba, which has private booses almost as nice as Manboo's. The Manga Hiroba booses are wooden-walled, and shoulder-width. The Manboo ones are walled with some kind of silver-ish fiberglass substance. Blue track lighting abounds. Each Manboo booth is equipped with a computer, a television, a garbage can, slippers, a footrest, a phone for placing food orders (I recommend the vegetable korokke -- served for 200 yen during the happy hours of 11PM and 7AM) and a PlayStation2 on which all the salarymen of the world play that new damned Dynasty Warriors game. If you place a specific request, and speak clearly, you can be appointed to a booth with an Xbox. I've been doing that off and on these last few days, to play Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball.
A perk of staying in an internet cafe overnight is the drink bar. This place has a fountain with C.C Lemon and ginger ale and a machine that spews bitter black coffee. Manboo has hot cocoa and frozen Fanta; I get one of each whenever I chance upon a Manboo. I drink until I go to the bathroom fourteen times, and then pass out. If I'm in a Manboo, I'm sure to take advantage of their oh-so-clean shower room before I pass out.
(author's note: the last time I returned from an internet cafe bathroom during my recent stint in Japan, the walls of the Shinjuku Manboo Honten (that's the "original" location) shook with an earthquake. The Shinjuku Manboo Honten is underground, and the ceiling is -- I'm not kidding you -- less than six feet high. I felt like I was running through a submarine during a torpedo attack. I bumped my head on a padded pipe, and realized why it was padded. I later heard that the earthquake had been a six-point-something, and therefore pretty damned big. It was kind of scary, yet kind of cool at the same time.)
Tonight I've gone to the bathroom six times while playing my little fruity casino games and building girl-to-girl relationships with volleyball players I hear are fighters in some, uh, big game franchise. Eight more bathroom usages, and I'll probably go to bed.
Hell, I've been wanting to go to sleep for a long time. I ate a bowl of sixty-yen miso soup at Yoshinoya at around ten tonight as I listened to a Blue Hearts mix CD. The whole time, I was thinking that I'd like to go to sleep. I didn't go to sleep. In the interest of my Manga GeraGera bill, and in the anti-interest of my point card (if all goes well, I'm getting two hours free tomorrow night, yo), I browsed Shiki ROM HOUSE for an hour and a half.
Shiki ROM HOUSE, for my money, is the best videogame store in the world. I used to like Kami-Fukuoka's ROM HOUSE better. These days, I hang out in the Shiki location about four hours a day, so I'm starting to like it better. I don't mind when they play Gackt or Morning Musume on the stereo. I just turn my Blue Hearts up louder; my Eggos make that possible. No matter how high my own music goes, I can still almost-hear my shoes against the wooden floor.
In addition to having every videogame you could probably ever want -- yes, H-games, too -- Shiki ROM HOUSE has a huge wall of CDs. Within this wall are used copies of every CD by legendary Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts, who have provided my homelessness soundtrack for close to a month now. I was listening to them when I walked away from my doomed job interview in Shinagawa on the second day of my homelessness. I'm listening to them now, as I type this. Their hits -- from "Rokudenashi" to "Linda Linda", have kept me walking with my head mostly up for a while, and they'll keep doing it a little longer.
I love Shiki ROM HOUSE. I take it the people in there are good people. There were two guys behind the counter tonight, and they were whispering about car steering wheel covers, like any good people of the college guy variety are known to do in Tokyo. I was peering at them -- maybe a little madly -- from behind a rack of Sega Saturn games. One of them saw me at last, and bit his lip like he'd just caught an old friend watching new pornography. I scuffled off, and perused Mega Drive games. They had Landstalker, for 580 yen. It was majestic. I almost bought it, just to hold it close to my body for warmth.
This morning, when I was watching the Final Fantasy X-2 demo, I noticed a woman in her forties and a powder-blue turtleneck sweater was watching it, too. When the trailer ended, she watched it a second time, and so did I. Together, we watched it a third time. She had a used and 3980-yen copy of Unlimited Saga for PlayStation2 in her hands. At some point during the third run-through of the trailer, this woman whispered "Sugoi." I felt like saying something to her. I didn't. I probably would have come off like a weirdo. Either way, it's warming that such good people inhabit Shiki ROM HOUSE. So far from central Tokyo and its Akihabarology, it's nice to find such people who think such Sugoi things about videogames.
Times gone to the bathroom update: we're on nine.
It makes me comfortable that ROM HOUSE is just downstairs from here. It makes me comfortable that so many games are beneath my feet. It makes me feel nice. It makes playing Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball even more nice. It makes it feel like a better game than it might really be. I'm going to play it some more.
Times gone to the bathroom update: thirteen.
I decided I'm not going to review it. I'd rather not. The experience of playing it here behind a curtain of cigarette smoke is mine. If you, dear insert credit reader who might not ever reading this, ever find yourself at the Manga GeraGera internet and comic cafe in Shiki, Saitama, Tokyo, Japan (just twenty minutes north of Ikebukuro on the Tobu-Tojo Line), I'd heartily suggest playing Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball at an Xbox-equipped internet booth all night without sleeping.
Other than that, I don't really know what to say.
I suppose I could just say "Goodnight."
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