Toujin No Negoto　★　唐人の寝言

I've done a few martial arts in my time, and recently have started to dabble in Judo, my first Japanese martial art, and I must say it is very logical not to mention great fun and a hell of a workout. I recently watched an old, old documentary called Budo, which showcases some of the Japanese martial arts. To be honest the documentary was pretty damned funny in its crappy oldness, but the thought was in the right place.

For some reason a lot of the people they showcased were training in the most inappropriate places. I'm not sure how they did it in ancient Japan, but there was one scene of about 50 guys just standing all over a beach, on rocks, in the water, everywhere, just kicking, punching, shouting. It was pretty likely that these guys were doing it just for the sake of the documentary.

Apparently training in the Japan Sea is a mental exercise, as the temperatures can drop below freezing, but these guys were taking it over the top. I understand there is a mystical element to Japanese, and that training the mind is important, but these guys were pushing it man.

According to the documentary, a lot of the martial arts in Japan were made to combat the samurai sword. A great number came up because of bans on owning weapons, as in the case of Okinawan Karate.

So everyone knows about Judo and Karate, but what are some other Japanese martial arts?

Naginatajutsu is the art of using the 薙刀 naginata, which is a slightly curved blade on the end of a two foot staff. It looks like a glaive in its design. Safer versions are made from wood or bamboo. The advantage of this weapon is its reach compared to that of a sword. It was the weapon taught to women from samurai families, and as such it has come to be practices mostly by and associated with women. Personally I think it looks like a very logical weapon, what with the range advantage and all. Not to be confused with the less-taught 槍術 soujutsu which incorporates the spear.

Battoujutsu is the sword art of defensive countering. Similar to Iaijutsu, it consists mainly of drawing ones sword, attacking in the same swing (sometimes called 抜き打ち nukiuchi), and then resheathing the sword. Beauty in simplicity. And surprising I would guess.

Kyuudou - 弓道 is the traditional Japanese art of the bow. In older times it was an awesome way to attack from long range. It was a traditional weapon of the samurai, and when coupled with a horse (as in riding while shooting the arrow, not some other strange combination ), it became a great tool (this was called 弓馬の道 kyuuba no michi). Once guns took over their role, archery turned into more of a spiritual pastime, becoming infused with zen beliefs. Still widely prqacticed today, some people even don the oldschool samurai battle gear, horse up and shoot at targets for competitions.

Ninjutsu - That's right. God damn ninja fighting. The apparent story behind it is that it was developed by the (arguably non-existant) Kouga and Iga ninja villages. The aim of classical ninjutsu was to teach proficiency in 18 categories, from horse-riding to geography, from swimming to old fashioned swordfighting. It's still taught today, in various dilutions of its original structure, but I doubt there are many ninjas running around anymore.

There's something about Kansai comedians that just makes them damn funny. In fact now that you mention it, I don't recall a single memorable Japanese comedian who wasn't from Kansai. I know, I know, they exist. I know of them but I haven't seen any of their stuff.

The Kansai dialect seems to lend itself freely to humor, as you can see by watching some old reruns of the famous Downtown: Gaki no Tsukai, which you can find riddled all over Youtube. Gaki no Tsukai is famous for its 罰ゲーム batsu geemu, meaning punishment games. The team (consisting of a regular cast of five comedians) will take on challenges. The loser(s) have to partake in a punishment game. Sometimes it's humiliation, other times it's pain, but every time it's funny. You needn't understand Japanese to laugh at another's pain. What a sad race we are.

Depressing introspections aside, if you've not encountered any Kansai comedy before, check out the following link to Crunchyroll, who host most of the punishment games and even a few episodes of Downtown.

任天堂 nintendou, meaning 'leave luck to heaven' is easily one of the more innovative companies out there, right up there with Apple for providing the newest, coolest, and disproportionately expensive gadgets out there. Sure everyone's played the Super Nintendo, but from what Japanese guy's garage did this mega-company derive?

The Beginnings: a card company

Everything has to start small, and Nintendo was no exception. Nintendo can trance its origins back more than 100 years! Yamauchi Fusajiro started the then one-man company in 1889, and even then they had gaming on the mind; he hand-produced hanafuda cards, but they soon grew so popular he had to hire assistants to start mass production.

Things went very well until Yamauchi realised he didn't have a son to carry on the family business. He adopted his son-in-law, and in 1929 he handed over the reigns. This company went on very well, and in 1949 it was once again time to hand over the reigns to the next generation. Uh oh! The new president didn't have a son either! He ended up passing the baton to his grandson-in-law, later known as Yamauchi Hiroshi, who had quite a brain on him, being a graduate of the high-level Waseda university.

Business went on as usual, making various types of playing cards, not just hanafuda anymore. In 1953 they became the first company to produce playing cards form plastic. Apparently at the time playing cards were a big deal, and Hiroshi visited the then-biggest playing card company in the world. After seeing the U.S. Playing Card Company's office, he realised that he couldn't limit his company to just playing cards.

Going straight for the knockout, he propositioned Disney to let Nintendo to use their characters on his cards in 1959. He helped to change the image of playing cards from one of gambling to one of family fun, using these cute characters as his frontline. Success abounded, and in 1962 he opened up his company to the stock market. The following year the company was renamed from Ninteno Playing Card Company (a descriptive, but not very inventive name) to just Nintendo.

With the extra money that the public bought in, Nintendo branched out into other (random) areas. From vacuum cleaners, to instant rice (wtf), taxi companies even love hotels. That's right, children-friendly Nintendo tried to create a love hotel chain. But these ventures didn't prove financially stable; they flopped. One new area they did manage to produce good figures in was toymaking.

1964 saw the Tokyo olympics, and the economic boom that came with it. Unfortunately Nintendo got cut out of the action, with its stock prices dropping some 90%. The next year, a future player in the company's future, Yokoi Gunpei joined the staff as a technician. Just in time too, because Nintendo was heading for a crash.

How about we make cooler toys?

Coming up with new toys was a hard idea. Other competing companies had a firm place in the market (some of which are still around today, like Bandai). Nintendo still had their hanafuda factory, and one day in 1970, president Yamauchi Hiroshi went for a visit. He noticed an extendable arm, which was made by above mentioned Yokoi Gunpei, who just made it for his own amusement. Yamauchi liked what he saw, and told Yokoi to get a proper model ready by the Christmas rush. It was a risky but extremely productive bet. The "Ultra Hand" sold like hotcakes, and Yokoi earned himself a job making toys, the coolest job ever.

Yokoi was a technician, and had extensive electronics knowledge. So right from the get go it was obvious he wanted to build electronic toys. This worked out great for Nintendo, because unlike traditional toys, electronic toys can be sold at a huge price for their novelty value. Well, in the 1970s they could. Yokoi went on to develop a few big hits, one memorable one being the Nintendo Beam Gun Game, the older brother of the Nintendo light gun the 'NES Zapper.' The gun was built with the help of Sony's solar cells, and sold over a million units at 4,000 to 5,000 yen each.

The next biggest entertainment hit to come from Nintendo was the Laser Clay Shooting System. Using the same theories of the light gun and solar cells, Yokoi along with Nintendo newcomer Takeda Genyo turned old bowling alleys into electronic clay shooting ranges. Funny thing is, when they offered a special debut presentation to the press, the system completely malfunctioned. Takeda snuck behind the internal workings and manipulated the system manually, making it seem as if it were working as it should, which saved Nintendo a lot of red faces.

Modern Day Nintendo Is Born

It was 1975. Yamauchi had a dinner with one of his friends from a successful electronics companies. They talked about how computers were advancing so rapidly, and how they could apply the technology to gaming (I love this guys attitude).

Nintendo started to sell another company's machine in Japan, the Magnavox Oddysey, but they wanted to make their own. Unfortunately, they didn't have any idea how to work the complex microprocessors and all the gizmos, so they struck a deal with Mistubishi Electrics. In 1977 they released their first unit, the Color TV Game 6 (it had 6 types of pong, basically). The following year they improved on this, bringing the number of boring pong games to 15. A few different consoles were created, each selling a million units.

At the time, the electronic calculator business was booming (I can't even imagine a non-electronic calculator, thank god for technology). As the calculators got smaller and cheaper, Yokoi had an idea: Why not make electronic games that are smaller too? And then the next logical step: Why not make electronic games with a clock and alarm too? The higher ups must've like it, because 1980 saw the release of the Game&Watch (I shit you not).

Nintendo expanded its influence, setting up offices in New York to distribute this Game&Watch. Fake Nintendo prodcuts started to turn up in Asia (some things don't change), costing Nintendo a lot in lost revenue. But in Europe and the USA, sales were through the roof.

Yamauchi decided the way to go was to market arcade machines at boys. Shooting, shooting, killing was what he wanted and he got a man named Miyamoto Shigeru and Yokoi to work on it. They scrapped the idea and started to work on a game everyone knows: Donkey Kong. This game was wildly successful, and sold more than 50,000 units in America alone. It was later ported to the Atari and Coleco, but this was not undertaken by Nintendo. An 'if you want it, do it yourself' approach.


The next big craze was realised by a few different companies including Atari, Bandai and Sharp. A television gaming console that could play different games stored on cartridges. You know where I'm going with this one. In 1983 it was delivered. The Nintendo Famicom.

The Famicom was so darn popular that Nintendo ran into a few problems problem. The demand for the games was higher than the poosible manufacturing rate. Also, there was a defect in the early consoles, so US$500,000 worth had to be recalled. But they were making billions so in the long run it was okay.

The American video game market crashed in 1983-84 thanks to the masses of crappy, crappy games, taking out the Atari company for the most part. Nintendo wanted to market its new console in America, but noone would back it for them. They didn't want to repeat any mistakes they made in Japan, and so for future security, they added a protection feature on their console, the 10NES. Only games with this 10NES chip would play, locking out any unlicensed games.

1985 saw the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Famicom's international title, and with a new design to boot. To stop crappy games coming in for the NES, Nintendo America limited the number of releases a third party could make to five a year. Konami, being smartasses, just created a spinoff company to release more games. The NES outsold all competitors by a long shot.

In 1988, Nintendo Power magazine started, a magazine which is still in print today at over 200 issues. The purpose of this magazine was to advertise new games and tips, cheats, whatever.

Yokoi released his newest invention into the public in 1989: The Gameboy. The handheld (think small brick) gaming device that everyone's owned. This is the same year that Nintendo announced the NES's bigger and more super brother, the Super Famicom.

Another big name (that seems to have died out recently), Sega got snotty with Nintendo. Nintendo had told its third party developers that if they wanted to create games for the NES, they couldn't create games for other companies. Sega took them to court for monopolizing the gaming industry, and Nintendo changed their policies, marking the beginning of the console wars.

1990 saw the actual release of the Super Famicom in Japan, and it sold out completely in three days. It was released as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System In the USA in 1991, and Europe the next year.

In the US, the Sega Genesis raged a relentless battle on the SNES, cutting its market share from 95% to 35%. Eventually though, the SNES overtook the Genesis thanks to popular games such as Zelda, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter and Mario.

In 1993 Nintendo announed it wanted to make a 64-bit system, capable of rendering completely in 3D. The project name was 'Project Reality,' a lame but inspiring name. In 94, they renamed it to Ultra 64, which someone later down the track realised was already taken by Konami, so later, in 1995, they changed it to Nintendo 64.

Talk of a CD drive designed by Sony for the SNES was in the works, but Nintendo realised it wasn't so profitable in the long run, so they changed their partner company to Philips. Nothing came of the CD-addon idea in the end. Sony, feeling the cold shoulder decided to get revenge, and later released the Playstation. Philips also had a go, and had Nintendo licenses to produce games using Nintendo characters, but they suck and they failed. Nintendo released the Virtualboy, which completely failed too.

It was 1995 and Nintendo was starting to be pushed from the top position in the console wars, with Sega's Sega Saturn and Sony's Playstation dominating the market. 1996 saw a breath of hope with the (long talked-about) release of the Nintendo 64. Unfortunately not many games were available from the get go, and the cartridge media was limited in size. To combat this, Nintendo looked into developing the Nintendo 64DD, a disk-drive extension. Fail.

In 1996, the Gameboy Pocket was released, and soon after, one of the geniuses behind Nintendo, Yokoi Gunpei resigned. The same year, Pokemon was released, bringing Nintendo a huge ammount of money. I was sucked in by this craze and some poor souls still are.

1998 saw the Gameboy color, and 2001 the revolutionary handheld the Gameboy Advance hit the shelves. The same year, the Gamecube was released, but lost out in sales to the Playstation 2. The next year, Yamauchi stepped down as president, handing the job over to Satoru Iwata.

Also in 2002, Nintendo got in some trouble again for anti-trust activity in Europe involving price-fixing. They got fined some 140 million pounds, one of the most expensive punishments recorded for the
crime.

In 2004 came another revolutionary handheld device, the Nintendo Dual Screen (DS). It features two screens, one of which is a touch screen, allowing for all sorts of crazy/fun/boring games.

From here it was just the Wii to come, which launched in 2006. It includes another new piece of revolutionary hardware: controllers that bring interactivity to a whole other level than button pressing. The controllers are sensitive to movement in all directions, opening up a word of possibilities/injuries.

What's next for the gaming super-giant? Oh by the way, they still make hanafuda cards!

I'm not just limiting this to Japanese horrors, but what makes Asian horrors in general so different from, well, American horrors I guess. Let us think about some famous movies that have popped up over the years.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre - It doesn't matter wich remake you're watching the basic theme in this movie is the same. In fact, it's a theme shared by many Americna horrors: there is a huge guy who you basically can't kill, and he's got a chainsaw/knife/whatever with your name on it. This theme pops up in the Halloween movies, in the Jason movies too. In a way, Scream is the same. The scary thing is that this guy is unstoppable, no matter how much you stab him, shoot him, when you go to check his body, he is gone.

Final Destination - In my head I'm messing up whether I'm talking about the first, second or third ones, but I guess basically we can sum them up together. I wouldn't go as far as to say these movies are scary. They're definitely a part of the horror genre, but perhaps what I would call gore, or shock tactics horror. Parts make you jump, sometimes predictably, but its probably not going to rob you of any sleep.

Ringu - Great technique right from the get go: introduce a time limit. Boom. There ya' have the basis for a thriller, right there. Seven days to live, unless you figure out why the little girl is killing people who watch her video. The video itself is not only harder to piece together than a Beat Takeshi movie, it's also full of creepy effects. This whole movie is creepy. I can't vividly remember any sudden shock moments, but this certainly is eerie. Imagine the phone ringing after you finish this movie.

Chakushin Ari - Crap. Story is all over the place. I dunno about others, but I don't like the mixing of technology and horror. I guess Japan is a country smothered in technology, where everyone has a camera, a phone, a walkman, a credit card and tv in the same pocket sized package, so it would seem more realistic for them to recieve a voice mail from the future somehow. This movie just goes against logic in so many ways. I like that the chick went on TV to test if she would really die, that's what I'd do; get witnesses. But not really creepy, I mean come on! You knew when they were going to die!

Steven King's It - Brilliant. The creepiest god damn thing ever: a killer alien clown. At least from what I remember. I didn't like his weakness, but I really loved the fact that the movie plays on childhood fears. I'm not sure if clowns were scary before this movie came out, but they damn well are now. Creep factor bonus, crazy, unplausible but well-delivered movie.

Tale of Two Sisters - Okay, so it's Korean, but damn. It has the Fight Club-esque ending that just begs you to watch it a second time. This movie has the perfect mix of shock horror to eerie creepiness. When the mother chick goes to pick up her ring from the kitchen floor, you just KNOW something's gonna jump out at her, and it does, but it's still freaky as crap. Add that to the overall psychoness of the main character and you have yourself one good horror. Downfall was the ending, which seemed too happy.

So, lets contrast. Basically, in movies like Ringu an the Grudge, the emphasis is on the creepy. Sound plays a large part in these movies; when something scary is happening on the screen, it is usually accompanied by an unearthly sound that's unnerving just by itself (think the throat clicking of the Grudge). In many American horrors, you can tell something's about to happen from the music or lack thereof. American horrors tend to lean toward shock value, and just general pants-shittery (OMG this guy is chasing me and there's no getting away!).

I'm not condemning either, but I know which kind of movie makes me stop the movie and turn on the lights.

Now, this is something that just doesn't seem possible to my puny Western brain, but apparently the existance of 痴漢 chikan and I'm sure to a lesser degree 痴女 chijo are very common.

Let me explain. A chikan is basically a guy who rides the train like the gajillion other Japanese people. The only difference, is this guy likes to feel up women who are also on the train. This kind of molestation is pretty widespread, and they say one third of all Japanese women have had some kind of experience with a chikan.

How do these people get away with it? Japanese culture is a strange strange thing. I am more than sure that if that kind of behaviour happened in the West, especially a rowdy place like New York, I'm sure that the chikan would get a kick in the nuts if not worse.

Things have changed since the glory days though. There are now women's carriages, and also punishments for those found engaging in this unsolicited touching. So if you're ever riding the train, put both hands up on the rail. This way you won't be falsely accused of any wrong-doing. But even so, many women complain that police aren't helpful enough when it comes to these 'lesser crimes.'

The most famous chikan in Japan is Yamamoto Samu, author of the aptly titled book 痴漢日記 chikan nikki, the diary of a chikan, which sold more than 50,000 copies before being taken off the shelves. I know it's wrong to feel envious. Damn my DNA.

He is a part of a small group who meet and share their tips and secrets, and he is also the producer of a range of pornographic videos, aimed at the small niche that wanna' see this chikan-themed stuff.

If you're interested in learning more about Japan's sex-crazed wackiness check out the book
Tabloid Tokyo at Google books.