Category: Japan

Nintendo Is Finally Bringing Mario to Mobile Phones (with DeNA)

Wired and others have stories about how Nintendo Is Finally Bringing Mario to Mobile Phones. They are entering into an alliance with DeNA by buying DeNA stock (and DeNA will buy Nintendo stock.) Iwata (Director and President of Nintendo) and Isao Moriyasu (President and CEO of DeNA) made a joint announcement. You can see a translated version of the presentation on YouTube here.

This is a big change for Nintendo as they have been losing money as the traditional console gaming industry loses market share to casual and mobile platforms. I had heard ex-employees say Nintendo would never make the transition, but stay committed to tight integration of their games and dedicated devices. Obviously things have changed and now Nintendo will be deploying their IP to smartphones, especially to reach a global market. Nintendo stock closed 27.5% up.

My understanding of Iwata’s explanation was that they now see mobile versions as building their fan base and therefore helping sell dedicated devices/content. They are afraid that they will be marginalized globally if they don’t expand the reach of their IP. They have now decided how to use smart devices as a way into dedicated systems.

Because the interfaces are different, they don’t intend to just port existing titles to mobile platforms. Instead they will work with DeNA to create new content specifically for smart devices.

Database of Japanese Manga, Anime, Games, and Media Arts

The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs has released a first version of their Media Arts database (only in Japanese). This database has, among other things, about 36,000 game titles. I think the games database was developed by the team at the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (RCGS) – they were certainly working on this when I visited.

You can read an announcement from Anime News Network here.

Nintendo still unable to solve smartphone puzzle

The Nikkei Asian Review has a good article on how Nintendo still unable to solve smartphone puzzle. At the recent Replaying Japan 2014 conference I had a talk with some of the folks at Ritsumeikan who have insight into Nintendo. We talked about how Pokemon is controlled by Nintendo so the announcement of a Pokemon Trading Card Game for iOS is significant. It shows Nintendo is experimenting with tablets in a way that still protects the heartland (consoles and core franchises.) If the experiment works they might try some of the other franchises. If it doesn’t they can pretend Nintendo never bowed to app pressure.

The clock is ticking for an aging Asia

George Magnus has written two insightful articles in the Nikkei Asian Review on the impact of an aging population on Asian countries. The first, The clock is ticking for an aging Asia goes beyond the usual stories on Japan to look at other countries including India. The second, Strategies for winning the demographic battle looks at what is being done and what could be done.

What does this mean for the games industry in Japan and, more generally Asia? First of all, we need to remember that the Asian games industry is growing dramatically as the large countries like India and China get wired and videogame-capable systems (smartphones and tablets) become accessible. It will be interesting to see what happens as this audience ages. Second, we in the West are not necessarily the obvious export audience for Japanese games – Japanese companies may turn to focus more on South Korea and China than North America and Europe. There are cultural continuities that make certain types of Japanese games more likely to appeal in Asia than in the west. For example, warring state games – ie. games that have as a background the shared mythology of medieval warring states (whether the period of civil war in Japan or that of China.) Third, we could see Japanese companies developing games for the west in the Philippines as they move development offshore the way they have moved ship building.

To be honest, I am just guessing. I feel we need to understand the Asian game market to understand Japan (rather than thinking of Japan as our other), but I’m not sure where things are going. Magnus’ articles are the best news I’ve read on the issue of aging populations for some time.

Replaying Japan 2014

Last week we organized Replaying Japan 2014 here in Edmoton. This was the second international conference on Japanese game studies and the third event we co-organized with the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (in Japanese with English pamphlet).

The opening keynote was by Tomohiro Nishikado, the designer of Space Invaders – the 1978 game that launched specialty arcades in Japan. He talked about the design process and showed his notebooks which he had brought. Here you can see the page on his notebook with the sketches of the aliens and then the bitmap versions. I kept my conference notes on his talk and others here.

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The conference was a huge success with over 100 attendees from 6 countries and over 20 universities. We had people from industry, academia and government too. We had a significant number of Japanese speakers despite English being the language of the conference. After the conference we met to plan for next year’s conference in Kyoto. See you there!

This conference was supported by the Japan Foundation, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, the Prince Takamado Centre, the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, CIRCA, and the University of Alberta.

Demographics in Japan

How are Japanese demographics, attitudes towards sexuality and marriage, and gaming connected?

I decided I should check my assumptions about an aging Japan and looked around for some data and articles. One interesting study I came across, from Goldman Sachs, is titled Womenomics 3.0: The Time is Now (PDF). The report has information about birth rates and dependency ratios. They expect there to be a 2:1 ration of workers to dependents (children under 15 and the elderly over 65) by 2050. The report calls for initiatives that encourage more women to join (or stay in) the workforce.

On the subject on attitudes towards marriage and sexuality and how those are changing in Japan, I came across an interesting article in the Guardian titled, Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? Once you get past the human-interest sex frame there is a nice summary of some of the statistics and issues. The article suggests that the declining interest in getting married, having relationships and having children is not just a matter of women who don’t want to give up their careers, but a larger trend amongst men and women. They suggest it may be occurring in other countries too, especially those hit by the recession.

The Guardian article led me to a report by Eberstadt titled Japan Shrinks about the implications of the drop in fertility rates. The author makes an intriguing aside to the effect that, “Remarkably enough, there is a near perfect correlation between the demise of arranged marriage in Japan and the decline in postwar Japanese fertility.” More importantly he lists some of the possible side effects of the changing demographics. For example, young workers leaving Japan in order to escape the burden of supporting the elderly.

What does all this have to do with games? Well, the Guardian article and others make a connection between the attitudes to relationships and the availability of virtual relationships. Eberstadt spells out a possible connection when he writes:

  • In a recent government survey, one-third of boys ages 16 to 19 described themselves as uninterested in or positively averse to sexual intimacy.
  • Young Japanese men are, however, clearly very interested in video games and the Internet: In 2009, a 27-year-old Japanese man made history by “marrying” a female video game character’s avatar while thousands watched online.
  • Japanese researchers are pioneering the development of attractive, lifelike androids. Earlier this year, a persuasively realistic humanoid called Geminoid F was displayed in a department store window, appearing to wait for a friend.
One might also mention the thousand of dating sim games, ball-and-joint dolls, erotic porn, and other virtual substitutes for relations available in Japan for both men and women. To what extent are people worried that these games and virtual life-style options are part of the fertility problem (ie. the low rate of births)? Some of the discussion around otaku culture seems to focus on whether or not otaku are escaping into virtualized fantasies.

Animethon 20

Yesterday I went to the Animethon. This is a convention about Japanese anime, manga, games, cosplay and related culture that takes place every year in Edmonton on the campus of Grant MacEwan City Centre Campus. The three day event attracts thousands (probably around 6000). A sgnificant portion of participants are dressed up for cosplay. You can see my photographs on Flickr in my Animethon 2013 set. The best of the cosplayers I saw was the Hello Kitty samurai knight in the photo above.

It is tempting to compare this Japanese pop culture event in Canada to ones I saw in Japan, but I haven’t seen enough on either side of the Pacific to be sure. What is clear to me is that Japanese pop culture is big here in Edmonton and not just among youth. While there were a lot of kids (some with parents), there were also older fans (like me.) I loved the inventive costumes and there seemed to be almost as many men cosplayers as women. Many took real pride in their costumes.

Some of the panels I went to included one on the Touhou Project and one on ball-jointed dolls (BJD). There was a cosplay contest with some fabulous costumes. I also spent time in the exhibit hall were I picked up a WonderSwan and some games, including a copy of Rez. Now I need a PS2 to play it on!

The ball-jointed doll session was the most interesting as it was a community I didn’t know much about. There is apparently a strong BJD club in Edmonton and they meet to trade and teach each other. Many of the participants had brought their dolls (see my photos) and they seemed to be mostly mature women, though there were some men there too with dolls. I can’t help wondering about the differences between the doll culture in Japan and here. Here it seemed to be a hobby in the tradition of collecting dolls. In Japan there seemed to be a subset of male owners for whom these dolls are more than collectibles, but that may be a projection.

Culture Clash: A Truly Bizarre Domino’s Pizza Commercial

From Culture Smash an interesting example of West meets Japan, A Truly Bizarre Domino’s Pizza Commercial. This video nicely captures all sorts of phenomena like:

  • The dangers of cross-cultural interactions. Sometimes it is just weird.
  • The dangers of older men (like me) trying on cool Japan.
  • Vocaloids as a phenomena.
  • Augmented reality (and pizza).

You can download the free Domino’s App here. I plan to try it soon.

Antique Pachinko

This weekend I bought the “antique” pachinko machine above. (To learn about pachinko see this clip from a Wim Wenders documentary Tokyo-Ga.) It looks similar to the Monkeys and Elephants Nishijin type B machine from 1976 from this collection on Flickr. My Japanese collaborator Dr. Keiji Amano tells me it was placed in the Gomangoku pachinko parlor in Shizuoka in 1977 based on the license stickers in the lower left of the playing field.

There are a number of great resources on the web for people who like to collect and restore older machines. Here are some that friends have pointed me to:

A question that people have asked me is how a 1970s pachinko machine ended up in an Edmonton antique mall (which is actually more like a flea market)? James King has a good post, Pachinkos in America: Where Are They? on research he has done using analytics (on Pachinko Planet) which suggests it may be been brought over by a serviceman or by a company that imported used ones to the US. Here is part of what he says,

Japanese pachinko parlors for decades only allowed machines to remain in service for about a year before they had to be removed and disposed. This led to huge numbers of used machines available in Japan, and most were simply destroyed. However, it was not unusual for American servicemen to send or bring them back to the states as souvenirs. The numbers that trickled in spread out from our major military installations, but in the 1950’s and 1960’s these numbers were small, somewhere in the thousands. Few of these pachinkos have survived today.

In the early 1970’s a few enterprising gentlemen got a good idea for a use for all of those piles of expired pachinkos. They formed a company called Target Abroad LTD, and started buying them up by the thousands and filling shipping crates with them. They then shipped these crates by the thousands to America, and sold them through major chain stores such as Woolworth, K-Mart, and even Sears. Several other smaller companies quickly formed and opened pachinko specialty stores across the country. Two of the most successful were Pachinko Palace and The Pachinko Factory, and many vintage pachinkos in America today still bear their stickers. Literally millions were sold between 1972 and 1976, but sales began to plummet when video games were invented and then mass- produced. By 1978 nearly all imports of pachinkos to America had ended, and the retailers sold off their inventory and closed their doors forever.

It is possible that collecting and restoring vintage machines is more popular in the USA than in Japan. Dr. Amano tells me that there is little in Japanese to match the restoration manuals and videos available in English. Pachinko may have a charm for people in North America that it doesn’t have in Japan. To us it is an exotic pinball-like game with lovely designs (especially the vintage ones before they got video screens) from the mysterious orient. For the Japanese it is a reminder of noisy smoky pachinko parlours where older men gamble endlessly alone. Given how little Japanese research there is into pachinko (considering the extraordinary amount of money spent on it) it is likely that to many Japanese it is an embarrassment which they wouldn’t want to collect.