Japanese Hobbies # 3: Playing pachinko

So what is your image of Japan?

A romantically beautiful garden in tune with the surrounding environment, with cherry blossom trees sighing in the soft wind next to a carp-filled pond?
How about a wooden training dojo, alive with the thuds of kendo sticks and the thwacks of archery shafts hitting home in their stuffed-straw targets?
Or perhaps an exotically beautiful kimono-clad girl, playing a shamisen and singing in a clear high voice of love and loss?

All images of Japan, and all false.

The one thing that sums up Japan, that underlines the chasm between the image and the reality...is the pachinko parlor.

A pachinko machine is what you might get if a slot machine, a poker machine and a pinball machine had a threesome and engended some misbegotten mutant child. Knobs whistles and dials. Flashing lights. Cigarette-filled ashtrays. Sirens and blaring music. Hundreds of tiny steel ball flying around, bashing into each other and driving their noise into your skull like a hammer wielded by a meth-addict. Filling the parlor with a desperately unpleasant mix of loud noise, bright light and tobacco smoke. Pretty much my personal idea of hell.

Oh, and you have to pay. A lot. It's gambling Japanese-style. And just as the Japanese army doesn't actually exist according to the Japanese consitution, and thus passes itself off as the /Self Defence Force/; the pachinko parlor rewards its few lucky winners not with money directly, but with cigarettes, radios and lighters, which the patron drags around the block to the secretive yakuza-run pawn shop and exchanges for hard yen.

The most popular pastime in Japan. They are everywhere, from the smallest countryside town to the huge Shinjuku and Shibuya parlors with hundreds of machines.

On Saturday afternoons, when you may wonder why the parks and beaches in your city of 20 million or your town of 6000 are empty, you will find the answer when you walk by the open doors to the local parlor and see the lines of captive men inside, tied to their machines like the worst pokie-addict back home. Not only that, you will often find men in large numbers early in the morning, lining up outside waiting for the parlor to open. I can understand this, it gives the Japanese an opportunity to combine two of their favourite activities.

In fact, it is so popular that parchinko parlors are often the largest and most conspicuous buildings in a town or neighbourhood. Some theorists, observing that a society's largest buildings are often places of worship- cathedrals in Europe, temples in South-East Asia, mosques in the Middle East, have concluded that pachinko is actually Japan's real religion. Certainly its most popular.

Many magazines, books and internet sites are devoted to pachinko, where readers learn hints, tips and strategies. Many pachinko players are convinced it is possible to win long-term, by, for example, finding out which machines are programmed to pay out more winnings. In fact, many people have ambitions to achieve the Holy Grail of Pachinko Life, that is, to become a Professional Pachinko Player. Unfortunately I do not share their ambition.

In fact, I think it is fair to say that the very thought of the shuddering horror entailed by such an occupation is enough to make me doubt the existence of a benevolent deity.



Yeah- I don't get it either.

Japanes Hobbies #2: Stalking

A curious cultural fact, but it's true: Japan is a country of stalkers.


The phenomenon is a by-product of other cultural traits. Firstly, the hidden, repressed nature of sex in Japan; sexual relationships, while fairly common, are never publicly acknowledged. This means that commonplace 'Western' forms of courtship and gender interaction, such as flirting, are pretty rare and many men never develop mature ways of dealing with their sexuality. Secondly, Japanese men are emasculated and socially repressed from an early age; without effective social networks and with poor social skills, it is easy to fall into anti-social behaviour such as stalking or internet addiction. Thirdly, women, traditionally passive, are often unwilling to 'cause trouble' and complain about stalking to police or authority figures. Finally, the stalking behavior, incredibly, is not always seen as negative; it can be perceived as part of the tradition of 'gaman', or endurance, where ineffective and futile repetive action can be seen in a positve light: the stalker often believes he is courting; and indeed some Japanese dating guides suggest behaviour such as following your 'target' around waiting for the chance to create an 'accidental' meeting, over a period of weeks.

So stalking is pretty common; in fact, it is very rare to meet a Japanese woman who has not had at least one stalker, and many have one or more at any given time.

Western women living in Japan are not immune. Far from it; many Japanese men who become stalkers are obsessed with the curves, personality and hair and skin colour of Western women. You'll pick one up pretty quickly if you live here, and even quicker if you are young and live in the countryside.

Japanese police are infamous for doing nothing when stalking is reported; they are so well-known for their lack of sympathy that women very rarely try going to them; which results in massive under-reporting of stalking cases.

The most famous recent stalking case involved Tatsuya Ichihashi, who stalked English teacher Lindsay Hawker. After stalking and then killing her, Ichihashi was on the run for two years, changing his name, working, and having plastic surgery to alter his appearance. He was finally caught last month.

Most stalking cases don't end in murder but they are always unpleasant. A couple of first-hand accounts, all from my days on JET.

A British woman notices several underwear items go missing over a period of weeks. Somewhat alarmed, she tells her supervisor at the Board of Education, who tells her to hang up her smalls...inside. Which she does, only for more to go missing. Now she goes to the police, who merely tell her to hang up her undies inside (which she was already doing) and lock the door (which she was doing).
Months pass, things regularly go missing. There seems nothing she can do, life goes on. Finally a culprit comes to light...one of her 13-year-old students from the fist year of junior high school! Apparently this lad had been crawling through a ventilation window at ground level (too small for an adult) and nicking her underwear. It was only his mother that found them when searching his room...some 40 different items! Well. The police pass her on the BOE and eventually, after several days, a man knocks on her door, introduces himself as the lad's father, and gives her about $400 worth of Japanese yen 'to pay for more underwear', and also offers all her old stuff back...strangely enough she doesn't want it back, and she spend the rest of the year teaching the boy as usual in her usual school class.

Another teacher comes home to find her window open, her bed messed up and semen stains on her sheets. The police merely tell her 'lock your doors and windows' and when she asked about DNA testing, said 'we don't do that here'. Similar occurrences meet with the same response. She knows, from being followed, who the guy is, and after telling the police, she is told 'it is not him'.

And one Japanese woman I knew, a student when I was teaching, showed me pictures on her mobile phone her stalker had sent: pictures of self harm, bleeding razor cuts on arms and legs, supposedly to demonstrate his love for her. The woman told me she admired his 'gaman spirit' and the last I heard was that they were getting married!

But hey, who am I to criticise another culture that I obviously don't understand...

Japanese Hobbies #1: Lining Up

These happy people are lining up, both sides of the street, for hours, to eat noodles. The ramen shop (I had a look inside) has seating space for a about 8, and is just one of many ramen shops (mostly empty) in the neighbourhood.

But these people did not come here to go to just any noodle shop. Make no mistake: they have come for the line. Japanese people are nothing if not easily influenced: they saw a special about this place on TV, or read about it in a magazine, and would no more go into another nearby ramen shop to get their noodles in downtown Yokohama than I would line up for two hours to get mine. The truth is that Japanese poeople just love lining up. Banks, post offices, elevators, town halls, ticket offices and restaurants of all kinds...wherever it can be done, the locals will be out there, enjoying the 'group' atmosphere and the imagined purposefulness of it. Mostly single men here too. Poor bastards

It is a curious phenomenon. Originating from a natural inclination to accept being ordered about, and combined with almost endless patience, Lining Up is the inevitable result. Not only is a decent reason not required, sometimes no reason at all: it often happens that people will join a street queue, several blocks long, without having any idea what they are lining up for, on the grounds that 'it must be interesting'. I have seen this. In a society where there is essentially very little to do, this makes sense.

Why do Japanese people use umbrellas so much?

They are obsessed with them. Many people carry one at all times. And statistically, evey Japanese person owns 7 umbrellas, and as a nation they go through 100 million a year.

At the first sign of precipitation, and often before, they go up. There is no concept that a few drops of rain, 'spitting' as we say, is not going to hurt somebody. Rain, even in the Summer, which I find pleasant, is an evil in Japan, to be resisted and opposed like a foreign invasion or threat to civilization.

In fact, the sea of umbrellas in a crowd of Japanese is a symbol, I fear, of something more than just a few drops of water. It is, like so many things in Japan, symptomatic of a deeper malaise: the fear of nature in general. The same fear, the need and desire for nature to be feared, controlled and avoided, is behind the concreting of Japanese rivers, the chopping down of the forests, the concreting of the seashores, the fear of dirt and infection, even the traditional, thousand-year-old tradition of bonsai, where the natural power of a tree's growth is tamed and perverted. It is one of the great ironies of Japan- and there are many. For a country that is supposedly so enamoured of nature, exactly the opposite is reflected in the behaviour of the people.

Personally I despise umbrellas. One of my pet hates. They are unwieldy, clumsy, a waste of money, and often ineffective.

And if one is able to accept a certain level of precipitation, enough, say, to dampen the shoulders, umbrellas are unnecessary. Admittedly, at times rain is heavy enough to make going outside unpleasant, but if one waits 5 minutes the situation will almost invariably improve. This is because the level of precipiation is changing constantly, and statistically speaking, a random change is likely to trend towards the mean, in this case a situation of no precipitation. That is why a change in the rain, if the rainfall right now is heavy, is likely to be towards a state of rainfall that is less heavy, and very likely to be comfortable to a human being who is not childishly and unnaturally afraid of nearly the most benevolent of weather conditions.

And that's why I don't use umbrellas.



SPARTANS never use umbrellas.

Something Strange About Japanese Breasts

That is, I think.

They are smaller than they claim, size-wise. What a woman claims to be a C-cup would barely muster a B back home. Half of the boob size seems to be in the padding of the bra, which is both generous and ludicrous.

In the summer of 1989 I spent nearly every afternoon making love to Becky Huckster in her family's granny flat while ostensibly helping her cram for her end of year Geography exams. As for what the Japanese would make of her huge bulging bazongas, with those great hairy nipples sticking out like an old man's thumbs, and wriggling blue veins spreading across her chest like lines on a road map, it is impossible to imagine.

Why are there so many trannies on Japanese TV?

Japanese beauty: vagina not necessary




Talks shows. Game shows. Commercials. The Japanese queens, 'okama' are there in strength. Miwa Akihiro. Maeda Ken. Ikko. Haruna Ai. Ayana Tsubaki. Kaba-chan. Can't ignore them. Once you find out they're men, that is.

Some of them are hot. It's a bit disconcerting when you find out for the first time, when your girlfriend informs you.

Then you notice that the okama are excessively feminine, exaggeratedly, absurdly, comedically feminine. They're there to be laughed at, with the possible exception of the old battleaxe Miwa-san. Their value on TV is to provide variety, be laughed at, to amuse.

But what's going on here? Do Japanese people really believe all gays are trannies? Well, I think many do. In Japan, being gay is not about same-sex desire. It's about gender orientation, about being as ridiculously feminine as possible: same-sex desire is about crossdressing. The idea that same-sex attraction involves some kind of transgenderism or desire to be like the opposite sex is constantly reinforced in the media. To be gay is to be a queen. There are no straight-acting gay men.

But of course there are. They're ubiquitous. A casual aquaintance with Japanese night life will gain the average western man more 'Hershey Highway' invitations than an evening in an Oxford Street steam club.

Or hang on...maybe that's just me.

Anyway, gay sex is widely and easily available, and I personally think it is only a small exaggeration to say that Japanese men are constantly shagging each other. Japan is steeped in gayness.

Only it's hidden. Most of the men are married. And most, I suspect, would deny that they are gay. After all, to be gay is to be a cross-dresser. What these guys do is just sex. And as long as it is hidden, it is not frowned upon. Nobody minds. Kind of like sex in general in Japan. As long as sexual practices do not threaten the legitimacy of marriage and household, they are accommodated by Japanese society.

Which is a good thing. Sexuality is not the political battleground it is in the West. Homosexuality doesn't carry the baggage it does back home. There is little discrimination, and the kind of open hatred that you might come across in some Christian or Muslim communities is just completely absent here. There are no 'God Hates Fags' groups in Japan.

That's not to say the portrayal of all gay men as screaming queens is not troubling. The visibility of these men has not created the space for individuals to 'come out' in actual life- the development of a personal identity for gay men who express 'normal' gender identities is problematic. This, of course, contributes to the hidden nature of the phonomenon. But Japanese culture is not confrontational, and many gay men in Japan feel little need to 'assert' their rights. As one gay man said, "For me in Tokyo, subscribing to the concept of 'gay rights' is like carrying around someone else's baggage."

But the real question remains unanswered:

Why are there so many goddamn queens on Japanese TV?

Starbucks rocks

Best of a bad bunch, madly overpriced but always hot girls to have a perve at.

They know what they are doing- they know what people really want it sweet. Ordering a frappacino is like ordering a cup of sugar with a little coffee in it. Great stuff, a combo made with humans in mind.

The Prime Minister's wife is a space cadet

That's right. A certified fruitloop.

Yukio Hatoyama, the incoming prime minister, has an interesting wife. She is emerging as eccentric counterpoint to her boring as guano husband. While Yukio talks of international relations, Miyuki talks of interplanetary travel and...eating the sun:

"I eat the sun. Like this. Yum yum." Raising her hands in an interview and pretending to tear pieces off the sun. "It gives me enormous energy".

Well, nuclear fusion is likely to do that.

And in her book Very strange things I've encountered she related being abducted by aliens some 20 years ago and taken to Venus, which was..."a very beautiful place, very green."

She also reckons she knew Tom Cruise in a past life. I wonder if he remembers.

But I say bring it on. We need a dose of the alternative in Japan.

The Creepyness of Morning Musume

Morning Musume. Ubiquitous. Popular. Creepy as hell.

A no-apologies, no-holds-barred-made-for paedophiles girls band. Though most of the girls are mid to late teens, they can be as young as 12. They dance and sing sappy, cliched manufactured pop, wearing skimpy clothing and made up to the hilt; and they all have that "rabbit in the headlamps" deliberately brainless and defenseless look, designed to appeal to middle-aged paedophiles who are unable to relate to real women and resort to a ficitonalized semi-pubescent fantasy.

Formed in 1998, the name means "Morning Daughter", which is disturbing enough. Their biggest hit, "Love Machine", was sung by 13-year-old Maki Goto in 1999. Which is even creepier. The girls are kept young, as after a few years they "graduate", and new girls are recruited, so that the group survives and stays perpetually young.
All in all, I think it is safe to say that Morning Musume are not Japan`s noblest achievement.

This `band` could only exist in Japan, a society where paedophilia is tolerated and even encouraged, in that not only are girls sexualised from an early age, but adult women are expected to have a childish attitude to sexuality and retain it to maturity (forty-year-olds in pigtails anyone?)

If you have any doubts about the fan base of Morning Musume you can check out the audience leaving after one of their shows. Sends chills up my spine. No teenage girls in the audience; plenty on stage.




If all the semen pumped out from those guys the evening after the concert was collected, you could fill a swimming pool.

And then...you could drown the girls in it. How about that for a suggestion?

Shopping in downtown Yokohama

It amazes me that people can actually enjoy this. Then again, maybe it`s just a gender difference...because department stores are made for women...

...and hundreds of tons of Chinese-made junk, made en masse in factories and sold with 1000% markups. And these tons of junk are being displayed...by women; examined by women; bought by women; sold by women; wrapped by women; carried around in labelled plastic bags by women. Thousands of them, dressed and made up to the hilt, "picking out the trash that women are so curiously fond of," as Orwell wrote.