Writing for Tofugu, I try and read as much as I can about Japan. I want to keep on top of current events, learn more about Japan and, most importantly, hear different perspectives.

In all of the articles, essays, posts, and books I’ve read, I’ve noticed that there are a few traps that people regularly fall into when they talk about Japan. These few cliches have bothered me more and more over the years as it’s become increasingly apparent that they’re borderline harmful.

I don’t want to criticize others too much because Lord knows that I’ve done some pretty crap writing, but I really want to acknowledges these cliches so that we might get past them.

“Weird Japan”

A lot of people talk about Japan as “weird Japan,” a place where all the people are strange and do wacky things and nothing makes sense. I wrote about the dangers of focusing too much on “weird Japan” last year, but a few things have happened recently that make me want to bring it up again.

Last year, one of the more reported-on stories about Japan was about a small group of people in Tokyo. These people took body modification to the extreme by injecting saline into their foreheads to make what essentially looked like a giant bagel on their face.

It’s definitely a weird and interesting phenomenon, but the way that most outlets reported on this was sadly predictable and really disappointing.

It’s a new trend! Everybody’s doing it!

There were maybe a handful of people doing this in Japan, but lots of Western media outlets were quick to declare these “bagel heads” a “trend” in Japan, as if everybody and their grandma were sticking needles into their foreheads and letting the saline flow. Those kooky Japanese people!

More recently, Kotaku wrote about a hair salon in Osaka that created a hairdo that looks like a tomato. The author stresses that this hairdo is “not mainstream” and it’s hard to imagine that more than a few people in Japan have this haircut.

As if on cue people have begun declaring this one-off hairdo as “Japan’s Newest Hairstyle Craze.” What a weird country! People style their hair to look like a tomato!

There are certainly weird things that happen in Japan, but taking individual occurrences and pretending that they’re some kind of new, national craze is really disingenuous.

Instead, focus on the larger societal and cultural differences that actually set Japan apart from the rest of the world. As one Tofugu commenter so eloquently said:

After a while, it’s not weird [in Japan] in the obvious ways. It’s actually way weirder than that.

Going to Extremes

As you start to get interested in Japan, you’ll start to meet people who are really excited about the country. Isn’t Japanese food great? Aren’t Japanese toilets cool? Japanese culture is the best. I want to move to Japan!

On the flipside, there are plenty of people who love to gripe about Japan. As somebody who has trouble writing a lot (my essays for school were always under the minimum word count), I’m still blown away that Kotaku ran a 15,000 word rant about what sucks about Japan.

Neither perspective paints a complete picture.

Sure, there’s a lot to like about Japan, but there’s plenty that should cause concern, too. For me, things like Japan’s its flawed legal system, and its high suicide rate make me see Japan in a different light.

Raging against Japan isn’t helpful, either. For the most part, the bad things Japan have some sort of twisted logic behind them that fits them into a bigger context. It isn’t always something you have to like or agree with, but understand why the bad things are bad is incredibly helpful to seeing the bigger situation.

I think there’s a lot of value in a more nuanced approach. It’s not always exciting as going to the extremes and won’t elicit as strong of an reaction from people; but I think that through moderation, you’re a lot more accurate and learn more.

I won’t pretend like I know the One True Way to Talk About Japan, and I hope that people call me when my writing isn’t accurate or is misleading. But I think that these are things that really plague the dialogue about Japan and, once we get past these tired tropes and cliches, we can learn a lot more.

Bonus! Our wonderful illustrator Aya has whipped up a high-res wallpaper version of her illustration for this post, which you can find here.

I take public transit to Tofugu World Headquarters every day, and in the couple of years I’ve been commuting, I’ve seen people commit every faux pas in the book, and generally do some stupid, stupid things.

I’ve watched people step in front of moving vehicles, spit on other people, and generally disregard all rules of common sense and human decency. It’s enough to make me silently, and passive-aggressively, judge them.

It’s because of those experience that I was little more sensitive than normal to pedestrian behavior when we visited Japan earlier this year. While you might not be able to get around a country like the US without a car, you definitely won’t be able to go far in Japan without walking a few miles.

Because walking is so important, I think it’s pretty important to try and be a good pedestrian when strolling around Japan. After all, you don’t want to look like a stupid foreigner, do you?

Watch Your Speed

One of the most interesting factoids I learned recently is that a city’s size and the speed at which its people walk are correlated. The bigger a city, the faster the people walk; the smaller a city, the slower they walk.

It might seem like an obvious and not very useful factoid (and you’re probably right), but it put things in a new light for me. If you’re visiting Japan, you’ll probably be stopping by some incredibly populous cities, which means you might have to hustle a little bit in order to keep up with the crowd.

You don’t want to be the slowpoke who blocks the entire sidewalk. C’mon!

On the flip side, if you’re used to a more fast-paced, urban lifestyle, then you might need to pump the brakes a bit if you’re visiting rural Japan. Slow it down a bit. Take your time and smile. Be friendly!

Be Careful of Regional Differences

Obviously, there are some pretty big differences between walking in a major city like Tokyo or Osaka and taking a stroll out in the sticks, but there are other, regional differences are a bit more subtle than that.

The Kansai and Kanto regions of Japan (which contain Osaka and Tokyo, respectively) have been cultural rivals for literally hundreds of years, and they play out their rivalry in some incredibly strange ways.

For instance: in the two different regions, you stand on different sides when you ride the escalator. If you’re in Osaka, you stand on the right and pass on the left; in Tokyo, it’s the opposite.

Even though it’s one of the most bizarre, asinine ways two places can distinguish themselves (I mean, really guys?!), it can be confusing, especially if you travel from one region to the other. Just remember where you are and watch what other people are doing.

Look & Listen for the Signs

OK, this is pretty obvious. Your mom probably told you to do these things when you were a kid, but it bears repeating when you’re in a different country. Etiquette is different, signage is different and, of course, the language is different.

Fortunately even if you don’t speak Japanese, major Japanese cities have signs and signals in spades. Between that and the accomodations for handicapped people (some of which I’ve talked about before), you can more or less guess what’s going on.

Don’t Worry Too Much

When all else fails, just take a second to watch the people around you and see what they’re doing. It’s not rocket science, and there’s no real consequences if you screw up. Unless you’re deliberately being inconsiderate or reckless then no harm, no foul.

The worst that can happen is that I’m a few steps behind, silently judging you.

To the uninitiated, “pink tentacle” might conjure up some gross images, but for those of us who love reading about Japan, it means something totally different.

As long as I can remember, Pink Tentacle has been one of my favorite Japan blogs out there, and is one of the few that I can recommend both to people who know a ton about Japan, and to people who’ve never even heard of sushi.

It sounds cheesy to describe the feel of a website, but there’s no better way to describe what Pink Tentacle is all about. Take some science fiction, mix it with a retro feel and a good heaping of art and design, and you basically have what Pink Tentacle is all about.

The site dives deep into whatever subject it takes on, finding obscure materials from decades ago. Pink Tentacle is the only place I know of where you can find an illustrated anatomy of Godzilla enemies, post-apocalyptic landscape illustrations of Tokyo, and vintage PSA posters from the Tokyo subway.

After the horrific 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, Pink Tentacle understandably began shifting its content more and more about the aftermath of the disaster. Instead of the sort of coverage of 3/11 that was typical from major media outlets, Pink Tentacle covered 3/11 in a very Pink Tentacle-y way, with art and mythical history about the disaster.

Then, on April 19, 2011, Pink Tentacle went dark. After regularly updating for five years, the site, and all associated social media accounts just stopped updating.

As far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. Why did Pink Tentacle stop updating? There are plenty of theories: something terrible happened to the author because of 3/11; the author took up another cause in the wake of 3/11; the person behind Pink Tentacle just lost interest.

But nobody knows for sure. We’re all equally clueless.

I’ve tried to get in touch with whomever is behind Pink Tentacle, but haven’t had any luck. I’ve tried emailing Pink Tentacle to no response, and it’s been hard to find any other ways of communication. The site’s whois information is obfuscated, meaning that it’s extremely difficult to find any identifying information about who registered the site.

I miss Pink Tentacle a lot, but I take some comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one who misses Pink Tentacle, as evidenced by the numerous posts online begging for it to come back, and by the nearly 200 comments left on the last post on the site.

Pink Tentacle, where are you?

It’s heartwarming to see commenters on Pink Tentacle continue to leave messages for Pink Tentacle years after it went dark. On holidays, people wish Pink Tentacle a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The domain pinktentacle.com expires at the end of this year, on December 31^st. It’ll be interesting to see whether the website expires and gets snatched up by a domain squatter, or if somebody, somewhere decides to renew the domain and let us all wonder for a while longer.

Note: Tofugu and its staff are not responsible for any changes to the fabric of time that may directly or indirectly negatively affect you or someone you know. All time travel was done without malice and for research purposes only. Some names have been left out to prevent time-travel-related problems in the future. Please refer to clause 43.5a of the case “Time Versus The Supreme Court.” This document will be made available in your local supreme court office on February 22, 2094.

As I jumped into my time travel device yesterday (or was it tomorrow, this time travel thing really muddles with your brain), I remember going through my list of potential jumps thinking that too many of them were in the past. All of them, actually. Battle of Sekigahara? Too many arrows. The arrival of Perry and his black ships? Check. Done. Badaboom. The Mongols being wiped out by the Kamikaze? A breeze. Stephen’s party? I had to pass on that one, too many things to do, and had nothing to do with Japan or the Japanese language.

I figured it was time to jump in my time machine and travel to the future instead. Sure, there are still opportunities to change said future and alter what it was I saw, but in general I don’t see a lot changing due to my actions. No, I wanted to continue the theme of Japanese baseball posts just for one more week. That’s why I decided to travel to the future to learn what happened to this great American Japanese pastime. I’d like to present to you the future of Japanese baseball, as it stands today, so long as none of you muck it up and cause our line to jump to another reality. Butterflies will just need to stop flapping their wings, please.

A Major Move To The MLB (2013-)

It’s 2013 (this year!). The big story is Yu Darvish, the Japanese pitcher from Japan who made his MLB debut in 2012. After a strong first season, it’s his second season that really wows the MLB. After going 21-4 for the Texas Rangers with 6 complete games, 204 strikeouts, and and one no-hitter, he wins the first of two career Cy Young Award just beating out Justin Verlander and Felix Hernandez, who come in second and third respectively.

Our illustrator loves Yu

But this is just the start of things. I won’t tell you who wins the World Series (boy is it a good one!), though there is one Japanese player who does particularly well. It will help to open the MLB’s mind (if it wasn’t already open) to pulling more Japanese players over stateside at a much higher rate. In order to stay competitive, MLB teams would draft Japanese players out of high school and college, getting them before they have a chance to sign with a team in Japan, thus circumventing the posting system and getting young Japanese talent in the majors early on. The Oakland Athletics do particularly well at this, and by 2017 six of twenty-five members of the roster are from Japan, an MLB record at the time (it is broken three years later by the Baltimore Orioles, who have 8 Japanese players on their roster).

Superstars will begin to make their way to America as well. Shouhei Otani, illustrated above (by our illustrator Aya in present time, which I think is 2013), comes to America in 2015. Originally he planned to come to America straight out of highschool, but intense pressures on him by Japanese teams, coaches, and his parents cause him to being the first few years of baseball in Japan. He grows to regret this decision and comes stateside, debuting with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the beginning of the 2015 season. The fireballer throws 100 mph and has a wicked splitter, going on to win the Rookie of the Year award as well as joining the limelight along with Darvish as well as Tomoyuki Sugano, who makes the jump to the majors a year later.

But this barely scratches the surface. More and more Japanese players move to America, and it happens earlier and earlier. As more Japanese baseball players get experience abroad they transmit the positive experiences to younger baseball stars in Japan. They become less reluctant to come to America, and soon a trickle turns into a landslide.

Sadaharu Oh No Someone Broke The Homerun Record (2019)

You may remember the past articles we wrote about Sadaharu Oh, and things haven’t changed much since then… well, except for how his home run record has been broken, with asterisks, however. In 1964 he banged out 55 home runs for the record. In 2017 a relatively unknown non-Japanese player would break the record with 59 home runs. In 2018 he would do it again, though an “accident” where he would fall down the stairs ended his promising (Japanese) career early. In 2019, a Japanese player would break the record much to the relief of many nationalist baseball fans.

Controversy would stir when the non-Japanese player that beat Sadaharu Oh’s record got an asterisk next to his name saying “non-Japanese player.” It angered both sides of the table. One side claimed it made Japanese baseball look weak. The other side just said it was racist and unnecessary. Either way, the Japanese seemed to work harder than ever before due to this which led to a Japanese player breaking the record with 60 home runs, hitting the last one on the last day of the season. To be fair, it was also in 2019 that they added five games to the season raising it from 144 games to 149 games.

The fact that a Japanese player could hit 60 home runs was no accident, though. Advances in training technology, diet, and baseball skill as a whole had increased rapidly during the last decade. Japanese baseball players were just becoming really good, on par with the rest of the baseball world (South America, Central America, and America-America).

Still, the MLB was the place to play baseball. All of this talent continued to move to Japan. Even the Japanese home run record holder came to the NY Yankees a year after knocking those 60 home runs. While he didn’t hit 60 home runs ever again in his career, he batted a career .279, averaged 30+ home runs a year, and made three All Star teams. He wouldn’t be the only one, either. The Japanese baseball league began to get worried about losing all their players, and rightly so.

A Closed Nippon Professional League (2020)

In 2020, the Nippon Professional League decides to close the doors to MLB teams trying to snipe their top talent. By this time, the NPL feels almost like another AAA league for the MLB. Japanese players train for a couple of years as “pro” players in the NPL or non-Japanese players come over to get some extra practice in before heading to the Bigs. The NPL is tired of this, and they implement the Foreign Transfer Act of 2020.

The Foreign Transfer Act states that “no player of Japanese descent will sign with a non-Japanese team for the first 10 years of his career.” While by law they could not technically keep any Japanese player from moving to the US to join an MLB team, there were steep penalties for those who did. Anyone who broke this rule would be banned, for life, from the NPL, and while this may not seem like a big deal if your goal is the Majors, it did put a lot of pressure on younger players. If they failed in the MLB, they had nowhere to go. Some players thought it better to join a Japanese team and have a safe job for those first ten years.

Japanese newspapers, who owned many of the Japanese teams at this time, highlighted the failed attempts at skipping the NPL to join the majors in their newspapers. Others would publish articles going over the negatives of baseball life in America. While the propaganda was strong, the Foreign Transfer Act of 2020 was abolished a year later in 2021 due to negative publicity as a whole.

It was clear that Japanese people wanted to see their Japanese players play in the MLB. TV ratings for the MLB in Japan continued to climb while the NPL games on TV declined.

Is That A Cyborg On First? (2036)

Fast forward 16 years later. The NPL is on a sharp decline with hardly the popularity it used to have. Many Japanese players go straight to the Majors (especially the good ones), and the NPL is diluted with mediocrity and MLB has-beens. As a baseball fan, this saddened me to see happen, but it’s all part of evolution. If you’re backed into a corner you have to make changes. Although it happened nearly by accident, the NPL discovered something that would change baseball around the world.

Keisuke Andoh, a first baseman for the Honda Hawks (Honda now owns the Hawks, thanks to the huge piles of money they got via forays in robot and cyborg technology), is the first baseball player to receive a cyborg implant. Partly because of the ownership, but mostly due to a career-ending crash at home plate in the previous season, Andoh and the team management bet on a new Honda technology to replace both of his knees with robotic implants. At the time, no rules were in place regarding machinery that would increase your speed or skill in baseball. By the time the NPL could come up with something Andoh was batting .455, got 193 stolen bases, and was an overnight Japanese star. Oh, and did I mention he was under contract with the Hawks for the next 10 years? Honda would milk this one out for as long as they could. Their new speedster wasn’t going anywhere.

Many other players were getting upset. Fans were getting upset too. But, as more people followed in Andoh’s footsteps, mostly with small improvements at first, popularity in Japanese baseball increased as well. Not only did it increase in Japan, but the rest of Asia and America as well. The NPL was on the up and up, and money came before purity, so the NPL let cyborgization continue.

The Cyborg Era (2037-2050)

There were some rules that had to come with cyborg enhancements, however. Otherwise things would be unfair.

• Arm-swing enhancements must remain under 100cc
• Running speeds must stay under 20mph (32kph)
• Jumping enhancements must not allow the player to jump more than 1 meter into the air.
• Throwing enhancements must remain under 200cc
• No more than one enhancement per player

Once the rules were in place, teams got to work. Being the leader in robotic technology, Honda had the distinct advantage, though the cyborg-augmentation draft, which allowed additional enhancements to the worst teams, helped even the playing field in 2042.

Popularity in Japanese baseball grew 10x in the same amount of years. America, which still believed in the purity of the sport, banned cyborgization altogether, no exceptions. This only fueled MLB players to come to Japan in greater numbers. Great players with season-ending injuries came to Japan. Young players came to Japan. Everyone wanted to play baseball in Japan. Things had evolved and gotten a lot more exciting. Some changes included:

• Much larger fields and ballparks (good for strength augmentations as well as fitting all the fans who wanted to watch the games now).
• 120 mph pitches.
• Players regularly hitting 40+ home runs (until pitching augmentations caught up to hitting ones).
• Increased season length, going from 149 to 225 games played in Japan per year. The MLB was still 162 games per year.

Some would call this cheating, others would call this advancement. Whatever it was, it was popular, and it spread all throughout Asia and beyond.

Asia League Baseball (2050)

During the age of cyborgization in baseball (as well as with regular, rich, people), Asia as a whole gets better at baseball (as long as your definition of “better” means “more cyborgs”). Due to this advancement, as well as the general level of baseball in Asia increasing, we start to see that not just Japan is good at baseball, but Korea (all one country at this point), China, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Russia all are quite good as well.

In 2050, Japan, Korea, and China come together to form the Asia League Baseball, a direct competitor to the now waning MLB, consisting of three leagues, nine divisions, and forty-two teams all across Asia. In 2052, India would add four teams. 2053 saw the Middle East join in, bringing the team total to forty-eight. Russia and Hawaii would only join five years after that, but they would bring ten teams to the table, making it by far the largest and best baseball section of the world.

For the first ten years, it is Japan and Korea that dominate, with Japan winning 6 of 10, Korea winning 3, and China winning the last. Baseball comes down to the level of technology that you can produce for your players to use. Japan and Korea tend to be at the forefront in this regard. China also does well, but still has the problem where they need to play catch-up in quality (putting a lot of strong players on the disabled list for repairs). After the first ten years, however, Asia League Championships seem to be all over the board. By this time the draft has helped the weaker teams, and technology has evened out as well.

Now it would be the MLB that had to try to keep their players from defecting to the other league. Asian baseball was hitting on all cylinders here.

The Jackie Robinson Of Robot Baseball (2064)

Not “Taro” pictured above. Due to time travel restrictions any photo from the future may not be shown in the past

While cyborged up people were commonplace now in the ALB, robots were not. Although some robots had turned sentient years previous due to some amazing(ly dangerous) robot brain technology created by Dr. Nakamats Junior (a clone version of the great Dr. Nakamats), it wasn’t until 2064 that we see one of them attempt to play baseball. Just as there was “technically” no rule against African Americans playing baseball when Jackie Robinson joined the MLB, there was “technically” no rule against full on robots either.

And boy was the first one hated. Joining the Nippon-ham Fighters, ASI-43099b aka “Taro,” he was booed by the fans right from the start, even before taking an at bat. It was clear that Taro would have a hard time in the Asia League due to the venomous feelings towards sentient robots that Asia as a whole had. Despite doing well his first and only year for the Nippon-ham Fighters, he was a robot with feelings, so he packed up his bags and moved to the MLB, which was surprisingly more receptive to the idea of robots playing baseball.

By now even the MLB was allowing some forms of cyborgization, but they knew they needed to do something to keep baseball alive in America. 2065 saw not only Taro, but six other robots make their career debut as well to varying success. The ALB eventually warmed up to “The Sentients” coming back to the Asia League, but by then it was too late. The MLB had regained much of its popularity in the same way that cyborgization popularized the Asian leagues. The MLB and the ALB were on fairly even footing, which could only mean good things for baseball as a whole.

World League Baseball (2099)

It’s nearly a new century and advances in travel technology have made it possible to travel across the world in mere hours (hint: we travel in tubes now). It’s fairly unclear which league is greater: The MLB or the ALB? Also, by now the All Europe League, The African League, and the Australian / Southeast Asia Leagues were getting stronger too. South America would join the MLB, doubling the number of teams, but as you can see baseball has reached a “professional” level by the year 2099.

It is appropriate then that in this year, the MLB and the ALB agree to inter-league play. Each team would play thirty games a season against the other league. In the following decade the other leagues would join in (except for the All Europe League and Southeast Asia League, which were still at too low of a level to join), forming the first truly worldwide League.

At the end of it all? Well, of course there was a World Series. A real one this time, not one that’s only in North America. Finally, there is no need to fight outside the baseball diamond. The world is united in terms of baseball, and a lot of it is thanks to Japan. While some still hate Japan’s contribution to the world baseball stage, others would never have known baseball in the first place if it wasn’t for the robots and cyborgs that people take for granted today.

While I don’t want to comment on this for fear of changing the future, I will say that it is entertaining to watch. I don’t know if it’s good or bad (or rather, I won’t say if it is or not), but it is different, and it is where baseball will head… that is, unless one of you mucks up the future somehow, at which point this article will have been rendered useless and you only have yourself to blame.

One more thing: GO KENYAN PANDAS! (don’t ask about the name… the team moved from China to Kenya and never changed the name…) I love their chances at winning it all this year.

If you have any questions about the future of (Japanese) baseball, feel free to ask. While I don’t know everything, I did spend a lot of time watching games all over the world, reading up on the stats, and just enjoying a lot of future baseball culture. I’ll answer whatever I can so long as I don’t think it will alter events and create a future where we are ruled by Neo Nazis (aka the Nazi baseball team is not something you are allowed to ask about).

P.S. Have yourself a full sized header illustration to support your favorite future team, the Honda Hawks!

Square Enix has been kind of lousy for a while now, but finally the company’s CEO Yoichi Wada is stepping down. He’s been steering the company for over a decade, and in my opinion Square/Square Enix was much better off with Hironobu Sakaguchi back in the day, but things change, and Square Enix is in trouble. So what brought about this sudden resignation and what are Final Fantasy X fans so excited about?

Is there Hope for Square Enix?

So the main reason that Yoichi Wada is resigning is because Square Enix has had a really crappy time this generation. Their previous fiscal year was reported as an extraordinary loss. That’s bad.

Final Fantasy XIV was a massive failure, FFXIII sold well but had a generally mixed to poor reception, and the same goes for XIII’s sequel. Even my last hope for the company, Dragon Quest, is starting to crap out with DQX which is a MMO for NO RAISIN. FFXI and FFXIV were lousy! Square Enix! Stop making MMOs! You’re not good at it!

To be fair, it was announced in 2012 that FFXI had become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasy series. While that may be true given that monthly subscriptions really add up fast, it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t like the game and view it as the depressing turning point for the series.

Needless to say, the company’s long overdue for a major change. They’ve lost much if not all of their former glory. Instead of releasing great titles and classics like the old Final Fantasy games, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, etc – they’re dribbling out poorly selling games like Sleeping Dogs, XIII-2, and Hitman: Absolution.

Sure, some games of theirs end up being highly rated and doing well, but I just feel like Square Enix has lost their identity somewhere along the way. Sure, the latest Tomb Raider looks like a cool game and seems to be doing well so far, but that game is only under the Square Enix name because they acquired Eidos, the company that originally published Tomb Raider. Square Enix was even responsible for publishing Call of Duty: Black Ops II in Japan (what?). I know, I was surprised too. This company is all over the place.

Anyway, they need to overhaul the company and refocus and reprioritize and all that other good business stuff. Synergy. Good news is that they are doing just that. Only bad part is that by making all of these restructure changes they’ll be losing about 10 billion yen (over $107 million). That’s a lot of cash.

To make matters worse, Japanese RPG developers in general have been catching some flak for not keeping up with the times and modernizing for a worldwide audience. Stuff like this is part of the reasons that Japanese RPGs don’t make it to America like they used to. Games such as Dark Souls and Monster Hunter are exceptions to the rule here, but on the whole JRPGs are not received as they once were.

You’ve Changed, Final Fantasy… You’ve Changed

“I never realized… how bad of a game we are…”

The Final Fantasy series in particular has taken a plunge. The games are selling less and less copies and Square Enix has been having trouble getting them out in a timely manner. FF Versus XIII was unveiled over 6 years ago and there’s not even a demo yet. FF Type-0 was released in Japan about a year and a half ago but still has yet to see an international release.

For some unknown reason, Square Enix plans to relaunch FFXIV as Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. JUST LET THE GAME DIE, SQUARE ENIX. Seriously. I’m tired of it clinging to what little life it has. They’re also coming out with another FFXIII sequel called Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13. Again, I have no idea why. The other FFXIII sequel was pretty mediocre, why continue down that road? Not enough people like these games for them to keep releasing sequels and spinoffs.

New CEO = New Hope?

Needless to say, the new CEO, Yosuke Matsuda has his work cut out for him. I know next to nothing about him other than he was the company’s representative director before, but hopefully he’s up to the task. He’s got a long hard road ahead of him.

In my opinion, Square/Square Enix started to crap out around the time Hironobu Sakaguchi left the company and around the time Wada became CEO. How much blame should go where and all that is anyone’s guess. Is Wada solely responsible for Square Enix’s troubles? Probably not, but he was the figurehead and he’d lost face as the leader.

Final Fantasy X was the last FF game that I really, truly enjoyed. It was the last FF game released under the Square name before they became Square Enix, and I choose that game as the last reminder of Hironobu Sakaguchi in an attempt to forget that he was mainly responsible for FFXI being a MMO *shudder*

So why are FFX fans rejoicing as I mentioned in the title? Well, some might be holding out hope that with the CEO stepping down, Square Enix might return to the glory days it enjoyed leading up to FFX – but there is another reason FFX fans are happy. FFX is getting an HD makeover.

Aw Yiss, FFX in HD

Since most of this post has been kind of a depressing rant (sorry), I thought I’d leave you with some much happier news. Final Fantasy X is getting a rework. While not everyone likes FFX, I know I do, and I am definitely looking forward to playing it again with some smoothed up visuals.

FFX was the first Final Fantasy on the PS2, the first with significant amounts of voice acting, and also the first to warrant a direct sequel, even if the sequel wasn’t all that impressive (FFX-2 is getting a rework too btw). The HD remaster will be released on both PS3 and PS Vita, many thinking it will come out around June or so. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on it.

So tell me, are you excited for an HD remaster of FFX/X-2? What do you think about Square Enix’s current situation and Yoichi Wada stepping down? Do you see a bright future ahead for the company? Let us know in the comments!

Right before the whole Tofugu team left for Japan, we decided to try a nearby Japanese restaurant right here in the US. Even though we were a little apprehensive about eating there, we decided to give it a try anyway. What was the harm?

It turned out we should have listened to our instincts. This restaurant violated practically every laws of finding a “real” Japanese restaurant, and was one of the worst Japanese restaurants I’d been to in a while.

Fast forward about a month or so later. We’re in Tokyo, hanging out with the Gakuranman. It’s early afternoon, and we’re hungry for lunch. We eventually settle on a Mexican restaurant, and it’s promising: the decor looks right, the menu doesn’t look too bad, and they’re playing Tequila.

The food was bad. I’d been really craving Mexican food during the month we were in Japan, but this didn’t help at all.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about those two lunches, and what they have in common. Even though they were weeks apart and thousands of miles away from each other, the similarities between the two got me thinking about authenticity.

Why Is It So Hard to Get Authentic Food?

Both of those lunches were a disappointment because neither of them seemed to have really authentic food, whether it was Japanese nor Mexican. I started to wonder why it’s so hard to get authentic food in the first place.

There are lots of reasons it can be so hard to get authentic ethnic food. Even though you can get a Big Mac served identically anywhere across the globe, it’s not always easy for food to be copied so perfectly.

There are lots of barrier between you and authentic food. What local tastes are like, availability of ingredients, and all that. Believe it or not, it’s hard to find a bodega in Japan.

I’m not completely astonished that Mexican food isn’t great in Japan. There’s no Latino population to speak of in Japan, and most Japanese people haven’t ever had Mexican food. Given that, how can Japanese people really know what Mexican food is supposed to taste like?

What Is Authentic?

As I thought more and more, the word “authentic” kept coming up and coming up and I began to wonder what it even meant. It was a word that was so critical to what I was trying to figure out that it was hard to ignore.

At the Mexican restaurant in Tokyo, I told the Gakuranman that he’d never had a real, authentic burrito, even though I’d literally seen him eat a burrito minutes before.

It wasn’t as if the burrito were fake or imaginary or something like that. It’s just that it hadn’t met my standards of authenticity, whatever those were.

Unfortunately, the standards of authenticity are very subjective and malleable. There’s no objective checklist for you to cross reference if you wonder whether or not some food is “authentically” Japanese.

Sure, there are signs that point you in the right direction, but the finer details of what, say, constitutes as authentic Japanese or Mexican foods is up to interpretation.

As one Supreme Court Justice said, “I know it when I see it.”

Copy of a Copy

As I kept thinking about it, I realized that most of the Mexican food I’ve had in my life has actually been more Tex-Mex than proper Mexican food. More a localized copy than the real M^cCoy.

And when I think about it, a lot of the Japanese food I know and love isn’t really “Japanese” anyway. Tempura is from Portugal, ramen is from China, and sushi is from southeast Asia. But Japan has managed to absorb these foods into its culture and make them its own.

We like to think that there are clean, distinct lines between cultures, but they all sort of mush together after a while, even a culture as supposedly homogenous as Japan’s.

Bucking Authenticity

I’m not going to claim that you can get authentic, Japanese sushi in some landlocked place in the US like Iowa (sorry Iowans). If anything, I’m saying that you shouldn’t expect food to be the same in Japan as it is abroad.

But as much as we like to joke about sushi abominations, that doesn’t mean that Japanese food abroad has to be bad, or that different interpretations of Japanese food is wrong. Earlier this month, a Danish chef won first place in the World Sushi Cup in Japan. Instead of being penalized for going against tradition, judges were impressed that the chef embraced ingredients and techniques from Scandinavia.

I’d like to think of eating ethnic food a bit like watching a horror movie. You might be able to see the zipper on the monster’s costume, but if you suspend your disbelief, you might actually enjoy yourself!

Open Letter – Miichan, it’s been a whole month now, and I just can’t keep my mouth shut any longer. I know that this Tofugu-AKB48 rivalry is like that of the Montagues and the Capulets, or the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Zerg and the Protoss… but I never expected things to turn out the way they did between us. I don’t regret our time together for a moment, though I wish it could have had a little less like the AKB48 song “Love Wars” and a little more “Aitakatta,” but maybe that’s just me.

When you left my apartment you were caught by some photographers. I don’t want to say “I told you so” (but really, I did, didn’t?), so let’s not worry too much about that. Fact is, someone took your picture while you were leaving my place in the morning, and then they published it in one of those trashy weekly magazines. First of all, wearing that mask and that hat were a dead giveaway. That jacket too. It just screams “Minami Minegishi.” How could someone that’s into the lore and fandom of AKB48 not know it was you. So, I told you so. Okay, whew, got that off my chest. I feel much better now, don’t you?

In all my letters I always tell you to wear a full-headed horse mask, but do you listen?

This is what happens, Miichan. This is what happens.

All that being said, though, for most girls your age this wouldn’t be a big deal at all. But this is a huge The problem is, being a part of AKB48 means you aren’t allowed to date anybody. Something to do with the perceived innocence of everyone towards AKB48, or something similar? I can’t remember your exact words, but Akimoto AKB48 “The Big Boss” Sensei came up with these rules for a reason. You went ahead and broke the fourth rule of AKB48 (first three of course are “never talk about Fight Club”), and here I am, awkwardly, the one who caused you to break said cardinal 4th rule.

I know my lightly chiseled abs and extremely well-balanced face were too much for you to resist, but I still can’t place all the blame on myself. Would you take a 60-40 split? Surely some of your training as an AKB48 girl has given you some sort of resistance to men with collar bones like that of an ox, right? I mean, you didn’t have to blame yourself so much that you had to shave your head and publicly apologize in a YouTube video, don’t you think? I understand the whole “head shaving is a form of contrition” thing in Japan, but really, I’m not worth all of this. You could have at least asked me to come over and shave it for you. Get rid of some of those uneven spots. I could have helped you hit record on your video recorder, too. Maybe we could have hung out and continued that epic game of Risk: Star Wars edition? Wait, no, no, that’s why you’re in trouble.

What am I thinking? You’re mad at me. I mean, genuinely pissed off. I suppose I can’t have my cake and AKB48 it too, as the saying goes. When I text you it bounces back (Did Daddy Aki change your cell phone mail address?). When I call I get disconnected. Even when I go to that super secret McDonald’s location, you know, the one where you gorge yourself on twelve Idaho burgers every Friday night from midnight until two AM, you aren’t there. It’s just me and that lady who brings those cats inside. Is everything alright? Besides you being really mad at me?

No, no of course it’s not. How could I forget? You got demoted to an AKB48 trainee team. You’re just a replacement now for one of the “main members,” though in everyone’s hearts, especially my own medically concerning abnormally large heart, you are the mainest AKB48 member of them all. How far you have fallen, Miichan. For that, I am truly sorry.

One thing does confuse me though. Why pin this whole debacle on some other guy? I know you want to protect me from the AKB48 inner Yakuza circle, but I’m a big boy now. Is “Alan Shirahama” a real person, even? If anyone’s followed your AKB48 lore like I have, they’d immediately know something was fishy. You only like guys with big faces (I know what happened between you and Bob Sapp after he hit you with that Bob Sapp Sexy Beam), so this is all one big hilarious farce to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock the last seven years. Really, why try to hide us, though? I’ve always been around, and I’ve always been with you, even when you don’t realize it. I’m a supportive boyfriend like that.

One of our favorite moments

I get it, you need your space and you want to protect me… no, us. I’ll give you your space, you obviously have something planned that I just can’t see yet. You were always the thinking type, always using your words and arguments to tell me to stop “stalking” you or whatever. But you weren’t always just a smart one, you were good at running too, especially when I “followed you home,” and you were like “ha ha, Ko-chan, you know what would happen if they saw us together! Stop following me or I’ll call the police, or whatever.” So, no more emails, text messages, letters, drawings, Photoshops, locks of hair (you thought your hair got donated to cancer survivors?! HA! I saved it from their greedy heads! They can never understand how important your hair is to me!), dolls, body pillows, dolls with your actual hair, etc. NONE of that anymore, at least for the next couple weeks while you recuperate. I realize you need your space, and I respect that.

I do forgive you, though, Miichan. Even though you tried to hide everything that happened between us from the press to save me and my career… I still forgive you. And, just in case it might jolt your memory of us being together, my friend put us together into the same picture so you can remember.

TF48 ♥ AKB48 5Ever

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This is news, this actually happened, to some degree