The Kyote #8: Genius in 4 Colors
The News, This Week in Japanese History, & Much More
Welcome back to The Kyote! Enjoy us with a cup of tea, because today is Kawané Tea Day. Located in Shizuoka Prefecture, Kawané is one of the three great leaf-producing towns in Japan, along with Uji in Kyoto Prefecture (we’re biased, but it’s the best), and Sayama in Saitama.
The Quiz
A picture question any Japanese person will answer instantly. Can you?
Question: what’s this guy up to?
Answer at the foot of the mail.
The Hashtags
What are Japanese netizens discussing? A selection of top trending hashtags on Japanese X/Twitter this week.
Tuesday April 16th: #産休クッキー
ENGLISH: “Maternity Leave Cookies”
The culture wars have well and truly arrived in Japan — at least online. The latest flashpoint? The trend of women gifting their colleagues cookies printed with edible messages announcing that they’re taking maternity leave.
So what’s the problem? Well, a loud contingent on X considers these cookies unacceptable gloating, with expectant mothers well aware their co-workers will have to take up the slack in their absence. Now, why would everyone have to work collectively harder? Because many companies don’t bother to employ temporary replacements for people on maternity leave.
Obviously, this is a problem caused by employer, not employee, but here we are, criticizing women who choose who have babies — it’s lucky we’re not in a demographic death-spiral due to low birthrate (!!)
Wednesday April 17th: #チキンタツタ
ENGLISH: “Chicken Tatsuta”
Japan is a country of unparalleled culinary magnificence, where the balance of taste and aesthetics has reached the limits of human refinement.
Well, today McDonald’s released their new deep-fried Chicken Tatsuta burger with a tie-in to the new Detective Conan (English: Case Closed) movie, and that’s what the J Internet was talking about.
Narrowly missing out on most-trending hashtag? #Nugget_i — another McDonald’s campaign, this one for chicken nuggets, starring hot new boyband Number_i.
Thursday April 18th: #バニーガーデン
ENGLISH: “Bunny Garden”
Bunny Garden is a video game in which — it says here — you can visit the eponymous resort to “relax, and develop romance with the female employees who work there…forget about daily stress and have fun to your heart's content.”
A quick scan of video clips reveal said female employees are faithfully rendered big-titted dopes in revealing outfits, and the big gameplay innovation is the “PTA System”, PTA in this case standing for “パンツ・たくさん・ありがとう”, or “Thanks for Flashing Your Underwear A Lot”.
In a world where you are only ever one click away from scalding torrents of pornography, what is the appeal of a game where you must negotiate long minutes of on-screen text to get a quick glimpse of some badly-rendered polygons in the shape of a bikini?
It’s the same reason hostess bars exist in Japan, where men pay dollops of cash to talk to glamorously-dressed young women pretending to hang upon their every word — it is, apparently, relaxing.
Bunny Garden itself is trending because of the sudden release of a PC version; it was originally sold for the Nintendo Switch console (see feature story below for when Nintendo didn’t traffic in moron-bait)…
The History
This week in Japanese history the following events occurred…
Genius in 4 Colors
Japan, in the 1980s, discovered an infinite money glitch.
Four decades after a standing start in the carnaged post-WW2 wastelands where people ate rats plus knifed each other for the right to sell their daughters as whores to occupying American soldiers, insane bootstrapping had put the country on the verge of surpassing the United States economically.
It’s difficult for young people to imagine, sufficiently, the panic this set off in the States — especially when Japanese moguls starting feeling their oats and buying up assets at insane markups: art ($4b worth in one year, including several world records), manufacturing (car factories), and American institutions (Mitsubishi Estate’s purchase of Rockfeller Center in New York; one mogul taking control of the Seattle Mariners MLB franchise*).
Senators fumed. People protested. Yards of editorial hit newsstands explaining how we were getting economically Pearl Harbored.
The mood was summed up in novel form in Rising Sun, Michael Crichton’s “the dastardly Japanese are stealing our tech” thriller (writing about Japan was perfect for Crichton, who didn’t do characters, because he could just stick bushido clichés in his characters’ mouths).
Then, as international relations were getting about as frosty as those between the US and China are now, and largely for the same reasons (Donald Trump’s views on tariffs were born in the US/Japan car manufacturing disputes) — the Japanese score an incredible own goal.
This was the notorious book The Japan That Can Say No, which alternated essays from Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara and Sony founder Akio Morita.
Ishihara, a wing-nut at the best of times, kicks things off by suggesting it might be a good idea to give the Soviet Union access to Japan’s semiconductor prowess in response to US crybabying about vast and inherent Japanese cultural superiority.
Morita follows with an ace-A1 analysis of American business executives, essential gist: are greedy, dumb bastards — which might be true — then saying the long-term thinking of Japanese companies would inevitable crush their mergers-and-acquisition addicted American equivalents.
Obviously, publishing this in such a tense atmosphere was an awful idea, and soon after the first Japanese-capable American spotted it in a bookstore, hasty samizdat translations (including by the CIA) were circulating in US policy-making circles.
(Sony CEO and co-writer Morita, realizing it did not exact become his position as the head of a major exporter to trash his customers, lamely explained that the essays were not designed for an English-speaking audience — making himself sound even more of a snake).
It won’t surprise you to find out that The Japan That Can Say No, which means F*ck You America, We’re the Best Now! has not stood the test of time.
You also won’t be shocked that the appearance of this pornographic level of hubris meant there was an asset bubble lurking in the aorta of the economy.
Despite all the Japanese self-deception — and American fear — that led to amongst other things that great waste of paper genre, books trying to learn from misunderstood J business practices — the entire economic miracle was predicated on a bunch of financiers who by rights should have had the shit whipped out of them with their own calculators, conspiring with the banks, yakuza gangs and bureaucrats to pump bullshit real estate valuations.
The Kyote once read that at the height of the madness the land on which Tokyo’s Imperial Palace stands was appraised as worth the equivalent of every piece of real estate in the state of California combined (and if we imagined that we don’t want to be corrected).
The bubble burst, infinite money glitch over, 30 years and counting of economic mediocrity, you know the rest.
* * *
Hiroshi Yamauchi was an arrogant, micro-managing buccaneer with a taste for monopolies and, allegedly, adultery. He was also the third CEO of Nintendo, a Kyoto-based manufacturer of playing cards, which, as card gambling was and remains illegal, probably intimately linked with the underworld.
After securing the presidency of Nintendo from his grandfather (on the condition that he be the only member of the family allowed in the firm, meaning his cousin was unceremoniously turfed out), Yamauchi bagged a visit to the United States Playing Card Company. Turning up in Cincinnati Ohio, he realized that the biggest manufacturer of cards in the gamble-heavy United States operated essentially out of a dumpster in a god-forsaken corner of the city, and notwithstanding a Disney deal to distribute branded card decks, he decided it was time to find a new business.
Back in Japan, Yamauchi tried to jump on any trend that was going, which meant instant noodles, taxis and — apropos for the neighborhood Nintendo’s headquarters were situated in — a pay by the hour love hotel which, per The New Yorker, Yamauchi also frequented, which is the cue for an ass-covering footnote:1
* * *
Shigeru Miyamoto, still the creative avatar of Nintendo today, is often cited as the secret of the company’s video game success. Actually, it was Gunpei Yokoi who the world owes for teaching them how to play (also: he has one of the truly great names).
Long before any electronics passed through the Nintendo factory, Yokoi was pissing around one day with a home-made version of one of those extendable grabber hands when Yamauchi saw him, and decided it would be a perfect toy and their next big product release.
This was the essence of Yamauchi, a figure not unlike Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia Pictures, who was also at best a rough diamond, but had a near-pathological respect for the true artist born from his own total lack of creativity.
So, after the success of the Ultra Hand the next few years were a blizzard of Yokoi-developed fun: amongst others devices a baseball pitching machine and the Love Tester, basically a 2-person version of that Scientology voltage meter.
One day Yokoi’s on the Shinkansen and he sees a salaryman trying to forgot his existence by banging away at his pocket calculator like it’s a toy — presto, he gets the idea for the Game & Watch handheld video games in his head, instantly.
This, friends, is what we call genius. John Lennon has a chord and a feeling and all of the sudden he’s got Come Together. Yokoi invents what Nintendo is on a carriage full of people seeing the exact thing he did, then burped and looked away.
It’s like the answer to the question “How do you become an Olympic-caliber runner?”
Well, first you have to be an Olympic-caliber runner…
* * *
1989 - a new Japanese era starts, literally, after the death of the previous emperor. The era name is announced as Heisei (Achieving Peace).
No one knows it yet, but it is going to be a time of decline, then stagnation.
The first signs of the bubble’s end appear: stock prices start to wobble, then fall.
April 21st: Nintendo Gameboy is released. It’s the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, Satoru Okada, and Nintendo Research & Development 1, one of three teams Hiroshi Yamauchi set up in direct competition with each other, with the best ideas winning out.
Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy. Original image: IGN Germany
Here’s the key factor: you have a handheld console with a slot in the back for interchangeable games, so unlike the Game & Watch you won’t, in theory, ever get bored.
Add Miyamoto’s game creations, your Marios and Links, and you have an underpowered, 4-color, tinny sounding machine that eats batteries and sells a mere 110m units at the equivalent of about $200 each, plus tens of billions of dollars in game cartridges, including Tetris (another stroke of genius, this time by a Russian computer engineer). An amount somewhere near the GDP of Poland transfers into Yamauchi’s coffers.
And he kept the vast amount, obviously, and Nintendo today still pays way under market rate to their employees.
Gumpei Yokoi kept developing for Nintendo, including the objectively bad Virtua Boy console, the failure of which probably ate at least a half of one of those Gameboy billions.
Then one day in 1997, Yokoi was riding in a car on an expressway when the driver rear-ended a truck. They got out to inspect the damage and a passing car hit and killed Yokoi. The guy who had been driving got off with a fractured rib.
* * *
Nintendo almost didn’t survive the American backlash against Japan. Accusations of zombifying the youth of America with video games were amplified when Yamauchi, sensing it might behoove him to invest some of his American-derived profits back into the country, agreed to invest in the Seattle Mariners baseball team (the Mariners were in the doldrums and desperate for new investment)—
That salient fact didn’t help. The backlash was immediate, with “America’s Pastime” now becoming fodder for the dastardly Nipponese.
What kept Nintendo alive was the fact that the games were and remain fun. That’s it. That’s the secret. All you need is a few creative geniuses and a hard-nosed boss who can recognize talent and get out of their way by indulging their imperial tendencies on the other guys.
An actual brilliant work of closely-researched history, with an insane subtitle — or, for younger readers: we had clickbait too you know!
* * *
The former headquarters of Nintendo in downtown Kyoto, from where Hiroshi Yamauchi took over the world, and which lay empty for years, was recently turned into a luxury hotel by the owners, the Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, who say they’re seeking to continue the late CEO’s legacy:
We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live.
In 2024, for the first time, the population of Japan fell by more than 800,000 people in a 12-month span.
Detail of window at the former Nintendo headquarters, pre-renovation. Note graffiti by marauding bands of foreign Mario fans. Photo: The Kyote
The Answer
Question: what’s this guy up to?
Answer: playing a card/arcade game (in which the goal is to help wannabe idol singers pass auditions)
With revenues of videogame arcades in precipitous decline, game manufacturers decided they needed something more than quick 100-yen gobblers like Street Fighter or Mario Kart to get gamers well and truly addicted to spending whole days melted to their stools.
The innovation was called TCAGs (Trading Card Arcade Games), combining video games with the collecting/hoarding instinct, doubling the dopamine regime. The man in the picture is a so-called “Aikatsu geezer” — Aikatsu being a game revolving around paying for collectible cards featuring various clothing items, which are then waved at an arcade machine to help the in-game aspiring idol characters pass auditions.
It’s hard not to be dismissive about something so objectively stupid, but the ways humans seek companionship are so often rendered incomprehensible by the circumscriptions of our personalities. AND ON THAT SHATTERING NOTE:
Until next week,
The Kyote
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The Kyote is published from Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/postscript-the-man-behind-nintendo