Hachiware is a cute cat, and he is Chiikawa’s best friend. Oh yeah, and there’s also Usagi, but usually it’s Chiikawa and Hachiware doing stuff together.
Holy crap, Hachiware is so cute.
Hachiware kicks ass
It’s the ’80s, and you have only one quarter. Which game will you play?
Pac-Man is my all-time favorite game. In fact, I’m wearing Pac-Man boxer shorts underwear as I post this. I’m nuts for anything Pac-Man. That said, Star Wars was my #1 go-to game every time, as I mentioned in my post about the old arcade Bag-A-Tel as a kid.
I didn’t really play Defenders or Space Invaders in the arcade that much. I’d play them on my Atari at home. I preferred Galaxian over Space Invaders and I found the controls of Defender in the arcade to be too complicated with all those buttons.
And Tempest… wow. Star Wars and Tempest are the two I’d most want to play today. Playing games on an emulator and my Sega Saturn Virtua Stick is a great way to go at home, but the flight yoke of Star Wars and the analog knob of Tempest are two experiences that emulators can’t truly capture. For that matter, Centipede’s trackball is worth mentioning too, although while I liked that game, it didn’t come close.
Perhaps my least favorite of all of these games was Donkey Kong. I actually liked Popeye better, and Kangaroo even more so.
I scored a Sega Saturn pillow at Shimamura
The front and back of a neat Saturn pillow I found at Shimamura this week. It was actually put in the men’s section, discounted from 1300 yen down to 300! Swanky.
Cherry blossoms in Nagano Prefecture, April 2004
It’s cherry blossom season now! Going through my box of old photographs, I found these pictures of cherry blossoms in a park near where my in-laws live in Nagano Prefecture. We were visiting Japan for a month when I took these. These photos were taken on Fujicolor 200 film with my Canon AE-1 Program SLR camera. Below are photos I took at night on a bulb exposure with my tripod.
Lastly is this cute picture of Mayu I took the next day at that park.
The highest worldwide grossing movies of the ’80s
There are a few movies on this I haven’t seen. I’ve never seen a single Rocky movie all the way through. I don’t think I saw a full Rambo movie either. The most was seeing First Blood but it was on cable TV and I started it about 15 minutes late. I can’t recall ever watching any Richard Pryor movie. Never saw Tootsie because my parents didn’t want me to watch a movie involving transvestitism and I barely remember 9 to 5. My family weren’t big on James Bond movies either, and it wasn’t until high school when I finally saw the old Sean Connery movies. I’ve seen the rest off these movies. I remember the summer of ’89 when my friend Matt and I saw Last Crusade and Batman in the same day at the same theater on Bell Road. There was a cool game arcade next door where we played video games in between the two movies. That was a great day.
Tomy’s cute, little Robot Rascals
How many of these little Tomy wind-up walking robots did you have? I had two. I wish I still had mine somewhere. Maybe I do? These Robot Rascals debuted in 1977, and were later rebranded as Pocket Bots in the ’80s. Just looking at photos of these little fellas reminds of the sound they made while walking. I used to play with these with my Star Wars action figures, pretending that they were some sort of older Astromech droid still used by the Rebel Alliance. Mine looked just like the ones below.
When I was in college in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, these little guys stood guard atop my stereo in the corner of my desk. You can see one, out of focus, in the photos of my old bedroom I posted to Greg’s Life.
Meanwhile, in 1982…
I’ve fallen in love with Castlebeat
It’s cool how YouTube can, out of the blue, recommend music I’ve never heard of before and when I click to listen, I become completely enamored with it. I’d never heard of Castlebeat before, but now I’m definitely a fan. The above “Change Your Mind” music video showed up in the algorithm and the cute Japanese girl caught my eye. I clicked on it and loved it. The song reminded me a bit of The Radio Dept. with the whispering vocals. The footage used to make this video was taken from some Japanese short film from the ’60s. I’ve no idea what this movie is about, but this actress is very talented at expressing emotion.
Since I liked that video, next to be recommended by Castlebeat was this video of “I Follow.” This video uses footage from the movie Career Opportunities. That movie came out in 1991. I was 15 at that time and my adolescence was really kicking into high gear about that time. I had a subscription to Muppets Magazine in the ’80s and Jennifer Connelly graced the cover when Labyrinth came out and I thought she was pretty then. But in ’91, Jennifer Connelly and her boobs were so pretty and she became my imaginary wife. She was in other movies like The Rocketeer and Dark City, but after 2000 she became so thin and gaunt-looking. The most recent movie I saw her in was Top Gun: Maverick and she still doesn’t really resemble the round-faced beauty I fell in love with back then.
Lastly, check out this video. The previous two videos were fan-made, but this is an official video by Spirit Goth Records. I love the old ’80s video game arcade footage.
Castlebeat’s music can be described in different ways. Lo-fi, dreampop, shoegaze. I’m really not an expert, but I like the effect of nostalgia I feel while listening.
The Essence
This is a Dutch band called The Essence. Just as bands like Camouflage and Cause & Effect were like, “Shut up, we don’t sound like Depeche Mode! Depeche Mode sounds like us, so shut up or else!”, The Essence shares the same relationship with The Cure. If you didn’t know any better, you would have sworn that this is Robert Smith while listening. So listen to this or else you’re just not cool anymore.
“The Cat”:
“Only for You”:
“Mirage”:
The band isn’t a total ripoff, and the music is not derivative. No plagiarism, just similarity. The music is more post-punk than goth. Maybe a bit of a Creation Records feel to the music? And it’s not like the singer is doing the whole Robert Smith eye makeup thing either. I obtained their first album as mp3 format and burned it onto a CD to listen to in the car. I’ve been listening to it over and over for the past several days and I really like it a lot. It’s as if I’ve discovered some Cure albums I’d never heard before. I first discovered this band about a year ago as it showed up as a YouTube algorithm suggestion and I wish I had known this band 30+ years ago.
A birthday spent in Tokyo Station’s basement
Last week, the three of us went to Tokyo to submit a passport application at the US Embassy for Ulan. It was Mayu’s birthday too. Because I could pay for the passport in advance through PayPal, it sped up the process. An appointment is required, which I did online. We were only there for about an hour. We finished there around 10:30 am, then took the subway back to Tokyo Station.
The rest of the time we spent in Tokyo was in the underground shopping area beneath Tokyo Station. There they have Tokyo Character Street, which you can see in the picture above. I covered this place on my site 12 years ago, when I did a photo journal of our trip to Tokyo Sky tree in 2013. Tokyo Character Street is a collection of speciality shops, for Studio Ghibli, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Rilakkuma, One Piece (I hate that show), etc. It’s changed a lot since then. The Gundam Cafe is gone, and now there is a Harry Potter store, etc.
So these characters are from a comic/anime called Chiikawa. They’re like these adorable RPG characters who supposedly go on quests, but most of the time they are eating bento and drinking tea and doing cute stuff. Ulan loves these characters.Â
We had lunch at a grilled fish restaurant since the “Ramen Street” area had long lines waiting for those restaurants. It was Mayu’s birthday, so I let her decide where to go. We also had 1,300 yen parfaits after we did more shopping. Tokyo can be a bit expensive!
There were actually two Ghibli-themed stores there. These Porco Rosso punch puppets were at the one featuring high-end merchandise. I ended up buying more stuff for Ulan’s upcoming birthday than for Mayu’s birthday.
There was a Shonen Jump pop-up store where I bought a deck of Spy Family Uno cards.
One store had these neat-looking Evangelion-themed storage containers.
Ulan likes Kirby, although she’s never played a Kirby game before. I got her a pocket towel at the Kirby store.
There is a whole underground shopping mall down there too, which we only barely entered. We went to the Can Do 100 yen shop, Kaldi Coffee, and the Don Quixote snack shop. Looking at the map online, I realize that it is bigger than I thought.Â
Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long in Tokyo as it was a weekday and we had to go back to work and school the next day. We took the 2:40pm shinkansen back home. We had a nice time.