Tom

If you've ever wondered if those stories of people losing their wallets and then getting them back completely intact in Japan are actually true, I've got good news: I can confirm that as of the last 24 hours that is indeed the case!

For reasons I'm still struggling to fathom, I somehow managed to lose it while biking around for some evening errands last night and by the time I had reported it to the local koban (also a first for me; I don't exactly make a habit of talking to police in this country as an expat!), somebody had already turned it in at another one and I was able to pick it up from the local precinct this afternoon all of about 15 hours later.

This area not being particularly bustling and especially not with tourists, rationally, I was pretty optimistic it would turn up before long, but considering my wallet has, y'know, my credit cards and especially my Japanese ID, I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little stressed out regardless, especially going up to the cops without that ID in particular, which you're legally supposed to have on you at all times as a foreigner when you're in public. But thankfully everybody in the process was all good sports and didn't chew me out, which, hey, I'll take it. 😩

All that said, for as much as my perfectionist side sometimes beats myself up for not having S-tier perfect, native level speaking and listening skills—which have markedly improved since I moved back here regardless—it was all yet another reminder of just how much at least being functional in this language goes a long way to navigating these sorts of interactions in Japan. I've never been to this country without speaking and reading at least a little bit of the language and in this area especially where fellow foreigners are relatively far and few between (I go a lot of weeks without seeing any other westerners around here), it's difficult for me to imagine how I would have even navigated this or countless other situations since moving here if I only spoke English. It's not to fault anyone on the other end of these interactions, but from the reaction I often get when people first see me, it's clear that they're not really trained to expect people like me to walk in, which speaks volumes about how ready lots of areas in this country are to really accommodate non-Japanese speaking long-term residents, which will only grow in number as time goes on because of the ongoing labor crunch.

There's no real moral to this or anything; I just find myself thinking about these things a lot when I run into mini-crises like that that get resolved favorably seemingly in part because my simply being proficient in Japanese helped grease some wheels in ways that I suspect would be less so if I wasn't able to bridge that gap myself. Which I guess is to say, even if your spoken Japanese ain't perfect, either, be grateful for what you have because you're probably more capable of saving your own butt with it than you might realize.

I really really need people to understand two things.

First: Sometimes people talk about games in the 90s and early 2000s being 'AAA' games because they were headliners for their publishers or even platform sellers, big important titles that had a lot of marketing force behind them. That's fair. But do not take this to understand that the scale of production in any way resembled what we call 'AAA' today, or that this concept even existed. Symphony of the Night, the last great hurrah for 2d home console games, was made by a core team of roughly 20 people. These productions were what we'd consider small-to-midsize today, they just had a dramatically different place in the market. More programmers are credited on Blasphemous (2019) than on Symphony.

Second: It is very tempting to compare the median game coming out today to the games we remember from this era and assume that games back then were better, or that they were made better, or whatever, but no. The median 16-bit era game is not Symphony. It's The Mask for the SNES (1995). Most games are not masterpieces today and they weren't masterpieces back then.

baiken

At some point, my quest to own every true blue, dyed-in-the-wool traditional Japanese dating sim morphed into "let's buy as many retro console galge as humanly possible (that have mechanics of some sort and aren't just visual novels)," a mission that continues to this very day because guess who just spent 5000 yen on the mahjong spinoff of D3's Dream Club series. 🥹

I'm pretty sure this is the only full-on console mahjong game released in the 2010s that goes to the trouble of rendering the players as polygons like it's the height of games of this ilk on the PS1 (we're not counting Yakuza games here) and I'm a sucker for games that go to that sort of trouble for better or worse, so money well spent just for that alone?

I dunno.

But it's finally in my life now and that's what counts.