Hanamaki Matsuri 2017

Four years ago I wrote about the Hanamaki Matsuri, a three-day festival in my wife's hometown in Iwate Prefecture. Since then, a few of the food offerings have changed, but not much else. Unless you count the fact that, in 2015, the event actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with the most mikoshi on display at a single location (114).

This year there were only 104 mikoshi, but it's still the same good time it always was.

That last picture is from the shishiodori (deer dance), in which a hundred men and women in scary, predatory deer costumes jump around while playing noisy drums. It's probably the single coolest thing about Iwate Prefecture.

Never be bored again

Though it may seem like the very concept of life in Japan ought to be an endless source of entertainment and fascination in and of itself, expats do occasionally become bored. Want to know what we do when we get bored?

We directly translate the kanji that make up the names of places around the Tokyo metropolitan area into English, then assign them a North American state or province where they'd seem "at home." For example:

Akabane　→　赤羽 (red+feather)　→　Red Feather, Wyoming

Akabane is a major station in Kita Ward, Tokyo. Its name is made of two kanji characters: 赤 (aka, meaning "red") and 羽 (hane, meaning "feather"). The -hane makes a euphonic change to -bane, making the full name easier to pronounce. And "Red Feather" sounds like the name of a town one might find in Wyoming.

Now that you've got the basic principle, let's do some more!

Ueno　→　上野 (up field)　→　Upfield, New York

Nippori　→　日暮里 (day living village)　→　Livingston, Vermont

Uguisudani　→　鶯谷 (nightingale valley)　→　Warbler Valley, Virginia

Shinbashi　→　新橋 (new bridge)　→　Newbridge, Connecticut

Saginuma　→　鷺沼 (heron marsh)　→　Heron Marsh, Alberta, Canada

Jiyugaoka　→　自由が丘 (freedom hill)　→　Liberty Hill, Texas

Roppongi　→　六本木 (six pine trees)　→　Six Pines, Minnesota

Ochanomizu　→　御茶ノ水 (tea water)　→　Teawater, Massachusetts

Occasionally, English isn't the best target language for this game. "Yokohama," for example, means "beach to the side," but good luck finding a town with a name like that in the US. The Spanish equivalent, however, seems much more believable:

Yokohama　→　横浜 (side beach)　→　Playa al Lado, California

Akihabara　→　秋葉原 (autumn leaf meadow)　→　Prado Otoñal, New Mexico

Or maybe French is more your bag(-uette).

Aoyama　→　青山 (blue/green mountain)　→　Montbleu, Montana

Ikebukuro　→　池袋 (pond bag)　→　Sac du Lac, Wisconsin


See? It's fun.

Let's end GameStop

According to my records, I’ve visited the US about six times since I moved to Japan in 2003. No matter how many times I go back, I’m consistently stunned by the same thing every time: GameStop. Or rather, the fact that GameStop still exists.

GameStop really, really should have gone bankrupt by now. Capitalist Darwinism should have wiped its smug mug off the face of the Earth. I cannot begin to estimate the number of times I’ve seen a GameStop, thought to myself, “Hey, I wanna go in there,” and about five minutes later thought, “Why did I go in there?” I cannot recall a single visit to a GameStop store in my lifetime that did not result in disappointment, frustration or rage.

Why talk about this now? Q1 2017 has been a parade of negative publicity, from questionable policies to slipping share prices. This is in addition to what has been a years-long train of horror stories told by current and former employees and customers of the company that shed light on what is an increasingly dysfunctional organization. Bad press about GameStop is nothing new, and it never seems to go away.

From my perspective, the whole thing is amplified by a number of factors which, together, serve as ample evidence for the thesis statement, “GameStop is the worst ever and must be destroyed.”

1. In America, “pre-owned” means “in terrible condition.”

This isn't GameStop's fault, but it sure doesn't help their cause.

GameStop deals in pre-owned product, and in the US, this means they sell trash. Sorry for the awful generalization, but consumers in the US just do not take good care of their digital media. It’s like they’ve all got McDonald’s beef patties where their hands should be. I worked at Hollywood Video for a few years while I was a student and witnessed PlayStation 2 games being rented in brand-new condition, then being returned five days later looking like someone had used them to play Frisbee with the family dog. In what I estimate to be 30 percent of cases, a new DVD or disc-based game would be visibly damaged after one rental. It was as if our entire customer base consisted of three-year-old children who wore Freddy Krueger claws at all times. True story: A customer returned a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 that had snapped clean in two, telling us that his child “threw it at the wall.”
To put my observation in context, in Japan, rental discs stay comparatively pristine for a long time (although I'm speaking only about Japanese rental DVDs, blue ray discs and music CDs; game rentals aren't a thing here.

For a GameStop customer, this prevailing culture of not giving a shit means that buying any pre-owned product from them is like Russian roulette – but with worse odds. And since I don’t get to try my purchases out until I get them back to Japan, returning them to the store isn’t an option. I guess I could ask the sales clerk to show me the disc before selling it to me, but that brings me to point number 2…

2. GameStop’s sales staff excel neither at customer service nor in their knowledge of games.

GameStop employees don't answer customer questions in the interest of guiding the customer to a purchase that will make the customer happy. Most of the time, they only answer questions in such a way as to show off their own esoteric knowledge and oh-so-valuable opinions about video games.

Customer: [Indicates a copy of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare for the Xbox One] Is this a good shooting game?Clerk: Well, it's fine, but if you really want a good shooting game, you should check out Timesplitters on the PlayStation 2.Customer: I haven't owned a PS2 in years.Clerk: Yeah, well, that's your loss.

Exactly who has benefited from this exchange? Nobody. The clerk has made public his superior knowledge of now-hard-to-find games that came out at the turn of the millennium, so good for him, I guess. He also, however, displayed zero knowledge on the game about which he was asked.

I was in a GameStop with my friend a few years ago and we came across the game Brütal Legend.

Friend: Have you played this? It's not bad.Me: No...is it the same genre as Darksiders? I wasn't so into that.Friend: Only a little, but it's more like...Clerk: [Standing at least five meters away] Darksiders is awesome and so is that game right there! You should absolutely buy it!

Serioiusly, what the hell? Nobody asked the clerk for his opinion, but he just couldn't contain himself. Either this "sales technique" has worked for him before, or he's got an irresistible compulsion to join every game-related conversation within earshot. And it's not like my friend and I were talking loudly. The GameStop guy would have had to eavesdrop on us pretty hard to hear what we were saying. Or maybe it would be easy for him to hear, because most GameStop stores don't have many obstructions on the store floor, which leads me to my third point:

3. GameStop stores waste unbelievable amounts of space

There's a big GameStop near my mother's house that has what I estimate to be about 1000 square feet of retail space. Guess what's in that store? Less than two and a half walls' worth of shelves. And that's all. In the middle, where a normal store manager would arrange point-of-purchase displays and island gondolas, this store had enough empty space for a pro wrestling ring. After looking at one wall's shelves, I felt like I needed to run to the opposite wall, climb up the shelves and do a flying elbow drop.

I visited this GameStop in 2013, saw how empty it was, and made a mental note that I shouldn't expect it to still be there come my next visit to the US. But upon visiting in 2015, the empty GameStop was still in business. And still empty.

GameStop is rarely the most affordable source of used games, but that point is underscored in this case; I can't help but feel like every product sold there has to have its price inflated slightly to compensate for the fact that the store's management don't know how to use space efficiently.

4. GameStop renders products impossible to resell

This is the absolute worst, and the reason I've resolved never to shop at GameStop ever again.

I tend to sell games that I've finished to used game shops. This keeps my collection from getting out of control and allows me to spend more money on other important things, like food for my daughter. (Quirky, I know. Feeding my child is sort of a hobby of mine.)

But good luck re-selling anything you purchased from a GameStop, because they apply price stickers indiscriminately. They'll put a price tag directly onto a game's case, defying you to peel it off. But don't peel it off, unless you like your game cases adorned with patches of sticky residue which rob them of their resale value, not to mention make them disgusting to handle and doom them to be perpetually caked with dust and garbage. On one infuriating occasion, I purchased a used copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance that had a price tag applied not to the plastic case, but to the paper artwork inside the case. Obviously it would be impossible to peel the sticker off without ripping the artwork, which is why I still have the game despite no longer owning a PSP.

And when there's no case, they stick the price tag directly onto the game's instruction manual, or even directly onto the game media. In another PSP example, I bought a used copy of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories from the GameStop in Appleton, WI's Fox River Mall. Because there was no case, they had put the price tag directly onto the UMD, and then put that into a plastic baggie (which raises the question, why didn't they stick the price tag onto the baggie instead of onto the UMD?). With the price sticker on it, the UMD didn't fit properly into my PSP, so I peeled it off. Presto, one sticky, lint-magnet copy of GTA:LCS.

Maybe the store is called GameStop because it's the final stop for physical software resale, before the games are finally too messed up to change hands any more.

Again, I must contrast this with my experience in Japan, where second-hand games look like new, and can continue to look like new for as long as their owners take care of them. In this regard, visiting the US is like taking a time machine back to the barbarism of medieval times...a forgotten age when men beheaded each other for the slightest scorn, women were bought and sold like so much cattle and Gamecube discs didn't work because they were plastered with dirty glue and dead insects.

Put all this in the context of any other kind of retailer. You wouldn't buy from a furniture store whose cashiers second-guess your home decor choices because their manager told them to "push the leather sofas." You wouldn't buy from a record store whose discs are scratched and unplayable. You wouldn't buy from a bakery whose bagels are covered with stickers.

We all need to quit shopping at GameStop.

Let's Learn Japanese: Takumirosu

The Japanese preschool TV world was rocked this week by Mitani Takumi's announcement that she would "graduate" (which is a flowery way of saying "quit") her role as Takumi-neesan on NHK's morning children's show Okaasan to Issho. The announcement prompted an online outpouring of grief from her fans.

Let me clarify "fans." I don't mean the kids who watch the show. I mean their dads.

With a soft, motherly manner and a competent soprano voice to match, Takumi-neesan is a weekday morning favorite among one crucial demographic: fathers of small children, whose wives can't sing. So dads across Japan heard the news and started flooding internet forums with the word Takumirosu (her first name plus rosu, from the English word "loss").

This isn't the first time the public has mourned the "loss" of a celebrity in such a manner, nor is it exclusively men who react in such a way. In September 2015, women across Japan reacted with Fukuyamarosu when rugged pop crooner Fukuyama Masaharu got married.

Mitani's decision to quit is likely a combination of factors. For example, at 29 years of age, she's probably caught in a tug of war between her deafening biological clock and the draconian contractural requirements imposed on her by NHK – you know, just standard rules like:

• no boyfriends
• no childbirth
• no tattoos
• no eating on the sidewalk
• NO YELLING ON THE BUS

Takumi-neesan was already on Okaasan to Issho when I became a father, and has been since then until now, so I have known no other Uta no Oneesan ("Song Lady," her de facto title). Weekday mornings won't be the same without her.

Piss me off: Image macros

The internet is garbage.

I mean, LOOK AT IT.

"But Jesse," you're saying in my imagination because that way I can make you say what ever I want. "Why do you hate the internet? You use it every day. It serves you well. Aren't you being a little hard on the good old WWW?" (By the way, in my imagination, you have an Indian accent and a very low voice, and you pronounce "WWW" as "wuh-wuh-wuh.")

Well, let me answer that question with another question: Do you know anyone who posts things like this on their Facebook wall?

Not for you, it doesn't.

These JPEGs full of text have to go. I'm serious. What happened to pictures of....stuff? I mean, stuff besides words? These pseudo-images serve no purpose. They aren't art. They aren't intelligent. Best case scenario, they're insipid motivational posters. Often, you get the double whammy of bad wisdom paired with illiteracy:

C+ PS: YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT

The only thing worse than putting your asinine musings into an image file for no reason is making typographical errors when doing so. Nobody's going to edit your image and fix the mistakes. Those typos are forever. They're like the plastic rings that hold six packs together. They're only questionably useful, and after the short period during which they are used, they'll just end up choking a dolphin.

Any time I'm dumb enough to be tricked into reading the contents of one of these pictures, I curse myself for wasting time.

Guess what I found, a comma splice inside it.

Not only did you just read a depressing (albeit probably made-up) story, you're now ten seconds older. Sorry, your time is non-refundable.

Other times, the message itself is just not true. How many times after the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake did people re-post this iridescent map, thinking it showed the flow of radiation from Fukushima?

Being misinformed is forgivable. But what everyone inexplicably seems to forgive is the fact that these re-posted images are just thinly veiled, socially accepted examples of wholesale unoriginality. If you want to post an image full of words, post this one:

Here are a few more types of social network re-postables that I'd like to see permanently phased out:

High-context culture: a true story

A "high-context culture" is one that tends toward inference and unspoken messages, as opposed to direct and literal verbal communication.

I was sitting on the Saikyo Line, heading home after work this evening. I was playing BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma on my Vita (because fighting games on the Vita are the greatest gift to mankind since Prometheus brought mortals fire). Seated to my immediate left was an older gentleman (perhaps in his fifties) in a suit with a briefcase on his lap. Standing in front of the older gentleman was a younger suited man (perhaps in his thirties). Thirties was holding a handstrap his left hand, while holding an open beer in his right hand...and balancing an iPad in the crook of his right elbow.

My attention shifted nervously between my game and Thirties's beer, which I was sure he was going to drop while he fumbled with the iPad. My apprehension worsened after he dropped the iPad once, hitting my knee. It didn't hurt, but I was annoyed enough to wish at that moment that my knee had been hard enough to break the iPad's screen on impact.

Then it happened: While trying to put the iPad into his bag (which was on the rack above Fifties's head), Thirties managed to spray beer on both of us while everyone in the immediate vicinity looked on disapprovingly. A few drops landed on me, but the majority of the payload ended up on Fifties's briefcase. I dug through my bag and produced a package of tissues with my company's name on it and used one to wipe myself off. Then, in a brief moment of PR genius, I decided it would be nice to help Fifties out by giving him my company's pocket tissues, simultaneously creating an association between my company's name and the kindness of an unknown foreigner in his mind. I held the tissue pack out to Fifties, logo side up.

But Fifties refused my tissues with a single-handed "no, thank you" gesture. At first I thought he was just doing the polite refusal that is expected of Japanese people in all situations, but then I saw him regard Thirties with an expectant look and a nod toward his beer-streaked briefcase.

He was waiting for Thirties to clean up the mess he had made himself, which Thirties did in quick order before hurrying off the train at the next stop.

This entire episode happened without anyone uttering a single word. It was awesome.

Walkers

A nightmarish struggle with Blogger.com's template customization engine has led to the new look CIC now sports. I'm not thrilled with it, so you might still see a few changes around here in the coming days.

With my parents chomping at their respective bits for a chance to hang out with Daughter (the family's nine-month-old celebrity VIP), Wife and I decided to bring her overseas for a ten-day visit to the US. That meant ten days of frantic eating, drinking, shopping, gift giving and jet lag, all made even more frantic with the addition of an infant (not to mention the fact that my American driver's licence had lapsed, meaning we had to depend on family members for transportation at all times; in that respect it was like being 14 again).

I don't mean for this post to become another trite "reverse culture shock" observation (e.g., "OMG you guys, the American medium-size Pepsi is totally a Japanese large"), but on this trip I noticed something I've never noticed before:

Wisconsin needs more walkers.

OK. No. That is not what I mean.

Also not what I mean.

Oh, god. Anything but that idiot.

What I mean is that Americans are violently allergic to walking. I don't think it's our fault, exactly. Residents of the USA live in an environment that fosters an acute dislike -- you might even call it a phobia -- of walking. For example, my mother's apartment is less than a five-minute drive from the shopping mall, but the notion of walking instead of driving is discouraged by a perfect storm of inconveniences. No sidewalks, no crossings, no way to safely traverse the nearby highway exit ramp and about six feet of filthy snow piled up on both sides of the road where the plows have pushed it.

The result is a culture in which people have been conditioned to dread even the shortest pedestrian undertaking. In the parking lot of said shopping mall, my mother drove around and around looking for a spot closer to the doors, the farthest spot being less than a hundred yards away.

You'd think a country so preoccupied with NFL football would find the thrill in covering those hundred yards on foot.

Busy holiday weekend: Sumo

Monday was the Autumnal Equinox, a national holiday in Japan and the third and final day of my busy weekend. Around twenty co-workers and I went to Ryogoku in east Tokyo to watch an afternoon of the clash of the titans that is sumo wrestling.

Although simple in concept (you win by getting the other guy to either step out of the ring, or touch the ground with any part of his body other than the soles of his feet), like so many other things in Japan, sumo's simplicity is negated by aspects which are astonishingly complex. For example, in contrast to the two basic methods of winning I described above, there are technically more than 80 different winning scenarios, called kimarite. And even though a typical bout only lasts a few seconds, it is always preceded by several minutes of ritual leg stomping, salt throwing, hand clapping and mouth rinsing. The ratio of action to waiting approaches that seen in the NFL.

Despite getting cheap tickets and consequently being seated near the back of the balcony, sumo was more easier to enjoy (and to photograph) than I had expected. Using my zoom lens, I was able to capture a good number of decent shots.

Clap your hands ♫

Stamp your feet ♫

Throw the salt ♫

Slap him around ♫

Everybody ring out! ♫

Hanamaki throws a good party

Wife, Daughter and I went up north to Wife's hometown in Iwate Prefecture last weekend to enjoy their summer festival offering: The Hanamaki Matsuri. Although I've visited Hanamaki many times, this was my first time to visit during the festival. In fact, you might say this was my first real Japanese festival experience. And it only took me ten years.

Sure, Wife and I faithfully attended the Daita Hachiman Obon festival every August when we lived in Setagaya. And we made a point this year of checking out the Yanagisaki version of the same, which takes place a short distance from where we live now. But it turns out that these affairs, which basically boil down to a handful of yakisoba stands and a bunch of old ladies doing the traditional Japanese equivalent of line dancing, pale in comparison to real Japanese festivals.

Real Japanese festivals are gnarly!

Hanamaki's festival is essentially three days of sporadic parades happening all over the city at various times, with each day capped off by a big "main parade" that lasts from late afternoon until after dark in the city center. The main parade begins with mikoshi ("portable shrines" that are carried in a surprisingly reckless fashion down the road by crowds of shouting citizens), then moves on to dashi (elaborate floats, pushed manually and flanked by musicians) and finishes off with the distinctly Tohoku tradition of shishiodori (the deer dance; imagine a hundred dudes dressed like nightmarish heavy metal monster deer beating drums and jumping around...or, if you're imaginationally challenged, watch this video of shishiodori dancers at Fujiwara no Sato Heritage Park in Esashi, Iwate).

In contrast with the meager food selection usually offered at local festivals in the Tokyo area, here there is an entire street dedicated to pedestrian cuisine: grilled this, candied that, what-have-you on a stick, yaki whatever. You have to walk up and down both sides of the street and see what's there, otherwise you might eat your fill of something and then find out afterward that there was something better up the road.

It typically pours rain on at least one of the festival's three days. This lends a certain je ne sais quoi to the spectacle and the experience, but makes photography a pain in the neck. Luckily, it only rained on the third day of this year's festival. I took the photos below on days one and two. Click to enlarge, naturally.

They carry mikoshi in a zigzag down the road so that spectators on both sides can see.

Dashi. Many of these are decorated with fairy tale or historical figures.

Yes, the dashi are decorated with real torches. And yes, sometimes the dashi accidentally start on fire.

Shamisen players

Torches are deployed before the shishiodori performance

The mask sits atop the deer dancer's head, making him look taller than he really is.

The girl on the left fans the kids carrying the mikoshi. But nobody fans the girl. Her sacrifice is forgotten.

Taiko drummers

On the way home, we had to wait for a passing shishiodori troupe.