Akihabara, January 2000.
As I'd written in my
So in terms of gaming, or what is now referred to as "retrogaming," when I first moved to Japan I had a Super Nintendo, Playstation, Saturn, and Dreamcast. Of course, I was already into import gaming and had bought Japanese games even before my first trip to Japan in '98, but when I first started living in Japan and started earning a paycheck, oh man. Especially for the first few months, I was quickly running out of cash soon before my next payday.
In Himeji, there was a video and CD rental store called Something which also sold video games. Holy crap, they were liquidating their brand-new Sega Saturn games for 1000 yen each! I bought several brand-new Saturn games from there: Batsugun, Guardian Force, Blast Wind, Vampire Savior, the Parodius games... I passed on some games like Marvel vs. Street Fighter because at the time I was only interested in Marvel vs. Capcom, and I passed on Sengoku Blade because I saw the boobs on the cover and wasn't sure if it was a straight-up shmup or not. I cannot remember clearly, but it's possible that I may have passed up the opportunity to buy Hyper Duel for only 1000 yen. There wasn't much information on many of these games back then, and there certainly wasn't anything like YouTube to watch gameplay.
I also went on shopping expeditions to Osaka. Many might not know this, but Super Potato got its start in Osaka's Den Den Town before one was opened in Akihabara. I've since gotten used to it now, but back then, holy crap! Nerd shopping was euphoric to me.
So my first apartment was a 1K apartment. The single ALTs lived in such apartments on the first and second floors, while ALTs with families (such as the Australians) could live on the 3rd and 4th floors. My first apartment was just a tiny apartment. "1K" means that it's just a one room with a kitchen. So I had a kitchen with a small table in one corner, my TV and sofa in another, my computer in the third corner, and finally my bed in the fourth corner.
This was my gaming/entertainment setup for my fist apartment. This was my first full-time job after graduating college, and I had such a tiny game collection then! My Saturn and Playstation were under the table, and on the table was my US and JP Dreamcasts. (My SNES was packed up at the time.) BTW, that big Toshiba TV with a flat screen had ridiculously high S-Video filtering. At the time, people confused it for an HDTV. I ended up giving it to my friend in 2012 when we moved back to Japan, and he still has it. It's gotta be super expensive now, the way CRTs go these days for retrogaming!
On that tiny little sofa, the other ALT guys and I would have Marvel vs Capcom 2 tournaments on my Dreamcast. One guy was a jerk. He lived in the apartment next to me and one-on-one, he was good to me. In a group, though, he was always putting me down in front of the others. He sure was nice to me when he wanted to play Marvel vs Capcom 2 though.
This was my gaming/entertainment setup for my 2nd apartment in Japan, in 2001-2002. After we were married in March, from April until July 2001, Mayu and I lived a cramped life in the first 1K apartment. Then in August we moved from the 2nd floor to the 3rd floor of the building after one single woman who had a larger apartment moved back to America. In this picture, you can see how my game collection had expanded, with TWO Dreamcasts (A US DC and a LE Sakura Taisen DC) and the addition of a Turbo Duo. Heck yeah. In the corner is my computer desk.
Here's to the left of the TV.
A close-up of my US and Japanese Dreamcasts. When I first came to Japan, I was using a boot disc to play Japanese games. The drive would grind back and forth for a while until the drive was ready to replace the boot disc with the game. So in December 2000 I bought a Japanese DC, and I wanted to make sure it would stand out from my American one. So I got a pink, Sakura Taisen LE DC.
Here is to the right and underneath of the TV. That's a black US Saturn you see here. I had just bought the Turbo Duo in Osaka's Den Den Town along with several games. They were cheap because the PC Engine wasn't popular at that time as the system had been retired several years prior. On that same shopping trip, one store had a literal pile of brand new, white Saturns for sale. The display was rather tall. I was so tempted to get one, but since I had just bought the Duo and didn't want to spend much more, I decided not to buy one. It's a shame, because I could have just used my credit card. Still, my arms were already full with shopping bags and we would have to ride a cramped shin-kaisoku express train back to Himeji that evening.
My floor chair for gaming. After we moved to Arizona in 2002, this chair stayed at the in-laws' place, and was re-introduced to our home when we moved back to Japan in 2002. But it had half broken by then, so several years ago I threw it out.
This was a 1LDK apartment, which means that there was one bedroom and a living room/dining room/kitchen. I had the best memories in that apartment, and it would've been better if we had an AC unit in the bedroom! It gets super hot in the Kansai area during the summer. God, I wish we could have lived in that apartment together for more than a year. It was our first real apartment together, and we had some good memories there.
Special thanks to my friend Lou for these photographs. I certainly did not have a digicam in 2001, and he brought a rather nice quality one on his trip to Japan and captured many photos of our apartment in Himeji.
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net
Next: the Queen is dead, boys, And it's so lonely on a limb
Go back to the "Greg's Life" Table of Contents