I visited Japan in February of this year, and during my stay, Asobitcity announced its closure, and Yamagiwa Soft burned to the ground.
It’s unusual, I guess, that my most concrete memories of both stores are of their pornography sections.
Asobitcity, famous for being the largest videogames store in the world, is famous in my mind for having the largest porn floor I’d ever seen – two floors, originally, but the basement ‘Porn Dungeon’ had been relocated to another building, in Akihabara’s ‘Electric Ghetto’, by my arrival.
I’d come to Akihabara with Tim Rogers as my guide, and it’s testament to him that the first place we went after a tempura lunch was the porn section. When we reached the floor, his point was quickly forthcoming. “What do you notice about this floor?” he asked me.
I’m not going to lie, even though what I’m going to say probably sounds like a lie. I’ve never browsed porn before. Even just being somewhere with so much was an eye searing horror to the set of morals my society had forced upon me. I could barely focus, never mind comprehend what I was seeing.
I hazarded a guess.
“Uh, it’s all men?”
Tim’s look of pity, maybe disgust, hit home how far from Kansas I was. It clicked.
It was all cartoons.
I actually couldn’t see an image of a naked lady who wasn’t the combination of pen strokes and paint. I say that – I couldn’t see a lady. They all looked like little kids. Little naked girls with wide saucer eyes. Some of them drawn crying. Or screaming. Or just…Defiled in some unusual way.
I tell you, it was all I could do to not run out of there screaming myself. [1]
What surprised me most of all, in fact, was the amount of pornographic PC games. In Japan, it seems, pornography and gaming are inextricably linked, if not in the minds of the consumer, at least of the minds of the vendors. Other than the most single-minded family owned stores like Retro Game Furenzu, if videogames are being sold, porn is being sold. Brightly coloured, exciting boxes of PC games all displaying new ways to defile a four year old. Well, you know what they say - Pornography drives technology. It certainly seems[2] that the only thing driving PC sales in Japan is the widely available smut, making accidentally wandering into the PC games section of a Japanese game store a more fraught experience than it need be.
Indeed, later in the day I quite innocently wandered into the PC gaming section of Akihabara’s Liberty #6, and much to my surprise, the first game to catch my eye had Psikyo’s logo on it.
Taisen Hotgimmick Cosplay Mahjong.
Dear god, I thought. They don’t make… Porn, do they?
A few days later I’d find myself stuck in Harajuku with nothing to do. My guide, Tim, was at a punk show I couldn’t afford, so I found myself doing what most of the other hip kids in Tokyo do on a Saturday night, it seems – pacing Takeshita-dori endlessly. After about my 5th circuit, I decided to stop in the arcade facing Harajuku station. It’s sign, tiny and hidden, did little to dissuade my fear that this was one of the arcades that was a quiet money laundering front rather than loud family game plaza.
Once I was inside, I found, as I expected, about 12 ill-kept machines, and a surly clerk chain smoking. I was, however, reassured to find a couple of salarymen, also chain smoking, hunched over some bewildering looking machines. Glancing at my watch, and with anywhere between half an hour to a couple of hours to kill, I thought I might as well spend them here.
My first 100 yen, pushed into a SNK vs. Capcom Chaos machine, was wasted, to all accounts, within 30 seconds. I didn’t even manage to win a round. “It’s alright,” I thought, “This place probably only caters for the hardcore.” The next couple of hundred yen later in games varying from Pop n’ Music to, uh, KOF2001, made me begin to balance up whether I sucked at games, or “drug front.”
I realised that the gentlemen on the unusual looking machines hadn’t moved since I’d came in, and neither had they been working their way through a stack of coins. I wandered over to find a block of 4 machines, each with roughly 20 keys. And, with the exuberance of a teenage girl discovering a UNIX system in a dinosaur theme park, I exclaimed, “This is Mahjong! I know this!”
The night before I’d stayed up all night with Tim, his flatmate Kasugi and Kasugi’s friend playing Mahjong on a pile of futons and drinking apricot Qoo. By now, I thought, I’m a master. And, to my pleasure, the mahjong game that was free was Psikyo’s Taisen Hot Gimmick. I sat down, put my money in, and attempted to ignore the murmurs from my salarymen companions. After selecting one player mode, I was greeted with a choice. Who would I play against -?
Tomoko Shimizu – A seventeen year old student with a sassy attitude?
Setsuna Yasui – A sixteen-year-old girl who doesn’t like carrots?
Or April Ogain – An American model who looks down upon the Japanese?
I decided on Tomoko. I can’t stand to hear a young girl use bad language, and if a game of Mahjong was going to help that, I guess I’d do my best.
The game screen is laid out simply enough, the player’s 13 (+1) tiles visible at the bottom of the screen, the discard piles above it, along with the player’s and opponents scores. Unlike ‘real’ mahjong, the opponent also has a 3-heart life bar, but in real life you don’t expect your opponent to strip after 3 bad hands.
The game of Mahjong, or at least the Japanese variant which I had learned the night before, is played using a set of 136 tiles, made of 4 sets of 3 suits of numbered tiles (Character, Bamboo, and Dot tiles) and 4 sets of 4 ‘Wind’ tiles (the kanji of the compass points) and 4 sets of 3 ‘Dragon’ tiles (unique Kanji.) After setting up, each player takes a tile from a wall of tiles, and discards a tile from their hand that they do not want. The aim of the game is to make ‘Mahjong’ – a hand of tiles made up of 4 sets and a pair. Each set can be a PON, a set of 3 tiles the same, or a CHI – a set of 3 sequential tiles of the same suit. In every case the final tile required, if picked up, completes a set of 14 tiles, rather than the original hand of 13 tiles. On top of this, there are several special hands (A set of 7 pairs, for example), the possibility of making a KON – a set of 4 of the same tile, and a complex scoring and gambling system, which merely conspire to make the game immensely confusing. Imagine my disappointment upon returning to Scotland to be told, on explaining the rules to a friend, that they’re basically the same as Gin Rummy. Feh.
Of course, at this point in my mahjong-playing career I barely knew any of this. Simply keeping my mind on making a simple mahjong was hard enough, made all the more difficult by the possibility of nudity as my reward.
The first sharp shock that made this possibility seem all the more remote had to be the fact that the player’s turn was seven seconds long. That’s right – seven seconds. The night before I’d spent what felt like a leisurely amount of minutes on each of my turns. Tim had told me that seasoned players would take their move instantly, the frenzied clacking of the tiles on the baize making a Mahjong hall sound more like a pachinko parlour than, as you might expect, a bridge tournament. Indeed, glancing over at my companions, they’d been hitting the keys fairly regularly.
From that point on, I didn’t have the chance to look away from the screen, as I’d already managed to discard 3 tiles with a wasteful 30 seconds or so of confusion. My plan to do as much thinking as possible during my opponents turn, proving to be futile, as the computer doesn’t spent any time thinking at all.
I began to concentrate on my task at hand – getting this girl naked.
To be frank, this made me more excited than it should have. Maybe it was that I’d spent the last two weeks sharing a cramped Japanese apartment without any, ahem, private time, but suddenly I became resolute to do this. The first round, I got ‘Tenpai’ (the state of needing only one more tile to get Mahjong) and my opponent got ‘No-Ten’ (she needed more than one tile to get Mahjong.) I was happy to see that this end result of a round meant that the opponent loses a heart. So, I could defeat her by 3 successive Tenpai/No-Ten results. And there it was – I did it again. Now my hands began to sweat as I began to wonder what I’d see if I got it again. Was she only maybe going to strip a layer of clothing off? Maybe it was going to be something really sick and nasty. Or maybe it was going to be really, really hot. I didn’t know. And I didn’t find out. Distracted, I discarded a tile without thinking, and she took it to declare mahjong – an ability I had forgotten about completely. If the opponent discards a tile that you can use to complete a Chi, Pon, Kon or a Mahjong, you can take it. The game is even generous in this regard – if it spots the opponent has a tile you can take, it gives you a few extra seconds to hit the button. It’s what the game is all about, really, in two player – it’s likely that your opponent will drop a tile that you need. I lost the game, and all because I hadn’t realised the ability to take an opponent’s tile.[3]
I’ll admit it – I was steamed. I slammed the machine, hard enough to rock it, and yelled – “What the fuck! I nearly had that bitch naked!” [4]
The reaction of my salarymen friends told me that it was time to leave. I was a little embarrassed as I walked my way towards the sliding glass door ext. To make it worse, it didn’t open. And there wasn’t a handle. Debating if my behaviour had been bad enough for me to be locked in so I couldn’t escape from a kicking from some Yakuza enforcers or something, I decided I didn’t care. “Open the fucking door” I said, in my roughest Japanese, to the surly clerk – who walked over, quite bemused, and triggered the sensor by standing roughly a foot behind me. How I didn’t trigger it, I don’t know. But I’d succeeded in making a dick of myself in Japan for only the 80th time, so whatever.
I walked out and shot hoops on the Yamanote line, sleeping on one of its glorious warm seats, distracted by its jingles, until I met up with Tim, and we went to go hit on some real chicks in the Family Mart down the road from his apartment.
I didn't get to see them naked, either.
[Next: Release]
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