After a few days of practice and frustration, I finally did it. My technique wasn’t perfect, but I could now spin a Japanese top, my new favorite toy. And I wasn’t alone. For the time being none of my students were thinking of their toys at home.

Japan’s traditional games are something I knew almost nothing about when I arrived in the country. Seven years later, I am still learning of new ones. From kite flying (and battling) to hanetsuki (think badminton) to karuta (a card game relying on recognition speed) Japanese culture has a wide variety of old-fashioned games to offer. But they are under threat.

“Children these days just want to play with video games or expensive toys,” a coworker said.

“They aren’t interested in the games we used to play,” one grandparent lamented.

I can’t disagree. Just go to a mall or ride a train, just about anywhere kids can be found playing with portable games or flashy new toys. I’ve even come across kids at playgrounds, sitting on benches and mashing buttons, absorbed in their miniature screens.

Perhaps the best proof of portable gaming’s popularity is the success of the Nintendo DS which by 2013 had moved almost 33 million units in Japan alone. With a child population estimated at about 17 million, that’s nearly enough units for every child to own two! Of course that isn’t true, gaming is popular with all ages. But it shows just how popular portable gaming has become.

As a result, traditional gaming is fading in the face of new technologies. But the good news is, we can enjoy both. And thanks to Japanese school curriculum many students do.

Japanese kindergartens for example, make efforts to preserve Japan’s gaming traditions. Since toys and games from home are prohibited at school, children have no choice but to use what’s available. A simple piece of paper can be turned into hundreds of different things via another Japanese tradition- origami. Give a child access to cardboard, newspaper and tape and what they come up with is amazing. I’ve seen makeshift swords, helmets, Kamen Rider (a perennial Japanese hero series) belts and even haunted houses.

On special occasions the children are given more complicated materials to work with. At my schools we decorate kites and umbrellas. Before every New Years the children are given plain wooden tops. The children give them custom paint-jobs before working on technique. The schools hold a “Koma Taikai” or “Top Contest” to give the students extra motivation.

The activity stirred memories of my own. When I was a child I had a different type of top. By twirling the stem between the forefinger and thumb and releasing it, the top would spin. Since there was no challenge my interest in tops didn’t last long.

My kindergartens have those types of tops too. The younger children played with simple tops to develop their skills. But the older class used more sophisticated tops. These tops came with a string that is wrapped around the toy to give it spin.

The wrapping process is complex and takes some practice. First, the knotted end of the string is wrapped around the upper stem once, using the tension created by the knot to hold it in place. Next, the remaining length of the string is pulled to the tip underneath and wrapped around it, careful to maintain the tension holding the knot in place at top. Finally the string is wrapped around itself in a spiral around the bottom of the top, usually until the entire bottom is covered by the string.

Now the top is ready for action. The remaining string is secured around a finger on the throwing hand, usually the pinky. With a sweeping forehand motion like in tennis or when skipping a stone across water, throw the top to the floor. The unraveling string makes the top spin.

On my first attempts even wrapping the string was a challenge. At that time a successful throw seemed like too much to hope for. But with my students encouragement and tutelage, I continued to try.

Finally able to make it spin, I took on all challengers- whose top would outlast the rest? I felt like a real Poke-master, my top substituting for the Pokemon. Time flew by. The experience was extremely satisfying – that is until we were introduced to another, more complicated top.

It happened at the Koma Taikai. A group of elderly gentlemen came to watch. After the contest ended, they brought out some toys of their own. First came a bucket. Next a piece of canvas which was draped over the bucket, creating a shallow bowl shape.

“Now everyone watch!” one of the men said. He held a small piece of metal in the air. “This is a bei-goma.” The other men had them too.

“They’re going to battle on that!” One student shouted pointing at the bucket. He was right. The men wrapped strings around the metal battle-tops and threw them spinning into the canvas bowl. It was Thunderdome without the dome. The tops knocked into one another, until only one remained.

Afterwards, they taught us how to use the beigoma which are more difficult than the tops we had grown accustomed to. The beigoma had no stem at the top and almost no tip at the bottom. The top of the beigoma were engraved with images. Among the men’s collections there were planes, butterflies and various kanji.

Since it lacks a stem, the beigoma has a unique wrapping technique. A beigmoa’s string has two knots. Instead of securing the string around the stem, the string is wrapped around the top and then secured around the two knots at the bottom. The string is coiled around these knots, creating the same swirling pattern as the wooden tops. The throwing motion is also different. A backhand motion is preferred with a quick flick instead of the long unwinding release characteristic of the wooden tops.

To battle one has to be precise, keeping the top in the canvas bowl. The top that remains spinning in the bowl the longest, often casting its opponents out, wins.

There are several types of beigoma with various widths, sizes and shapes. Some have deep swirls on the bottom while others have almost no markings at all. Some are a few centimeters tall while others clear only a centimeter. The size varies from as small as a 1 yen coin (a US penny) to the size of 500 yen (a US quarter). Aside from a round beigoma, the rest I saw were octagon in shape.

Beigoma have names that reflect their physical characteristics. Taka-ousama (高王様) is tall and heavy as it’s name, Tall King implies. Bei-ousama (ベ王様) is the smaller of the kings while Chuu-ousama’s (中王様) size lies somewhere between the other two. There’s Maru-roku (丸六) which, as maru implies is round.

Look carefully at the swirly design at the bottom of the pictured beigma. Does the swirl remind you of anything? Beigoma were once called baigoma (貝独楽) or “shell toys.” That’s right, long ago real shells were used as tops. The swirls on the bottom of the metal beigoma are a reminder of their natural past.

The whole experience left me feeling like many teacher and grandparents. It would be a shame if traditional games are forgotten, particularly Japanese tops.

But there’s hope. As long as kindergartens and Japanese school’s put an emphasis on games and activities with cultural heritage they will not be forgotten. Toy stores and 100 yen shops continue to carry traditional toys, which are cheaper than video games or fancy new toys – I bought four beigoma for 500 yen (about 5 US dollars). Manga and anime also introduce the games to new generations. Just as “Hikaru no Go” introduced many Japanese children to the game of Go, the Beyblade series brought tops, albeit fancy ones with techniques launchers, back into the limelight for several seasons.

In the month before the contest, talk of tops ruled the day. Students brag about how they practice at home and how family members teach them special techniques. So maybe there’s no need to worry- tops are here to stay. And that’s great because although I was able to spin the beigoma on the floor, I failed to land it in the bowl. And that’s great because it gives me another challenge to look forward to next season, though I may just look like I’m playing with toys.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• Beigoma.com
• Galiton Toy Shop
• Hyougo History Station
• indexmundi: Japan Demographics Profile 2013
• Matukazekouen
• Nintendo Consolidated Sales Transition by Region

Of course, it helped that Sayuri’s saga was made up. There may not be enough information out there to write a book about Yuki without filling in the cracks with fiction, but there can be no doubt that she led an interesting life. Morgan Oyuki created scandal and captured the headlines throughout her life and, incredibly, her presence alone may have saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb.

The Cure for a Broken Heart: 40,000 Yen

It was 1902, and George Morgan had just had his heart broken. His fiancee had split, so he took a trip to Japan to get over his feelings. George’s father was a rich man named George Morgan, and his mother was the sister of a considerably richer man, the famous banker J.P. Morgan. Yes, you may find it a bit creepy that both of his parents were born with the last name Morgan, but they were apparently unrelated. I’m skeptical.

Anyway, George was looking for something to cure his broken heart, and he found it: A Gion district geisha named Yuki Kato. He courted her for years, seeing her and asking her to marry him and visiting Kyoto as often as he could. She constantly refused, and something of a love triangle developed between her, George, and Yuki’s young lover Kawamura. The newspapers picked up on the story, and the scandal began.

Eventually, Kawamura moved away (maybe to avoid being drawn further into a scandalous story) and Yuki agreed to marry George Morgan. At this point, 40,000 yen, a tremendous amount of money back then, changed hands, and different stories give different reasons. Some say Yuki asked for the money in return for marriage, an old-school bride price situation, and others say the money was spent to release Yuki from her geisha contract. Whatever it was, George paid 40,000 yen or more to marry Yuki Kato, and this scandalous piece of news kept the Japanese newspapers talking for decades. January 20th, the anniversary of George Morgan and Yuki Kato’s marriage, is “Marry Into Money Day” to this day in Japan. It’s not a public holiday or anything, but it’s real.

With this marriage, the “Japanese Cinderella” story was born, and Yuki Kato became Morgan Oyuki. She left Japan with George, and visited America with him for a while. They found that the United States wasn’t quite ready to accept George’s young, recently geisha wife, so they left for France, where they would stay for the next decade.

In 1915, George Morgan was trying to return to France from America, as he’d done dozens of times. Due to the onset of World War I, this was no longer a simple process. To stay safe from German submarines, he took a ship to Gibraltar at the south tip of Spain, then had to travel overland the rest of the way to France. He would never make it. He died of a heart attack, and Morgan Oyuki was now a widow.

Mixed Narratives

At this point, the narratives split. Some accounts say that Oyuki left for New York, where three decades of Madame Butterfly performances had apparently now made the upper class more amenable to having a former geisha around. Wikipedia even claims that it was the Morgans who brought her there, but it cites a book that’s talking about something entirely different.

What’s wrong with that story? Oyuki hadn’t been welcome in New York about ten years earlier, and she probably knew English about as well as I know Tagalog. She learned French and spoke French so often that she was only an awkward Japanese speaker when she returned to Kyoto decades later.

Using Yuki’s letters and journals, Japanese writer Sumi Kosakai discovered what is probably the real story: Yuki stayed in France, living with a French ex-legionnaire who had been sending her love letters for some time. He would die a few decades later, and she would finally decide to return home.

Regardless of which story you believe, Oyuki returned to Kyoto in 1938, where she’d remain until her death in 1963. The Japanese media still wasn’t tired of talking about her, and every couple of years another novel or play based on her life would start the whole conversation over again. A 1947 issue of TIME Magazine details a particularly successful book about Oyuki which had been serialized over 260 installments in three different newspapers. Mademoiselle Yuki had never spoken with the author and refused to see him. The author had simply decided to fill in the cracks with fiction.

Box Office, Bombs

A movie director by the name of Masahiro Makino had a theory about Yuki. He said that it was his father, Shouzou Makino, who originally advised Yuki Kato to ask for an enormous amount of money to be wed. Makino says his father also met Yuki in France later on and tried to arrange a meeting between her and her former lover Kawamura, only to have Kawamura die along the way.

Masahiro Makino theorized that the Morgan family knew that Yuki had returned to Kyoto, and so they had the city stricken from the shortlist of potential atomic bomb targets (yes, this list definitely existed, and yes, Kyoto was originally on it).

It’s not by any means impossible that the Morgan family called off the dogs on Kyoto. If Lieutenant General Leslie Groves’ book about his experience leading the Manhattan Project is to be believed, it was Secretary of War Henry Stimson who adamantly took Kyoto off the bombing targets list. There have been a number of rumors as to why Stimson did this: Some say he thought it would be against the rules of war to bomb such a historic city. Some sources say Stimson rejected Kyoto because he had honeymooned there (embarrassingly, this may be the most well-supported story out there in historical sources).

But, if you’re willing to delve a little further into conspiracy theory, Stimson had also been a partner and close friend of J.P. Morgan’s personal attorney Elihu Root, and he was certainly well-acquainted with the surviving Morgan family. If the Morgans were aware that Oyuki was in Kyoto, which they probably were, and the Morgans still had the ear of Stimson, which they probably did, then Makino’s atomic bomb theory isn’t the wildest theory you’ll ever hear. But, to my knowledge, there’s no documentation or proof of this justification for saving Kyoto, and there’s been plenty written on the subject, even if it is a little inconclusive.

Finally, An Eyewitness Account

Despite all the scandal, the hoopla, and the “Japanese Cinderella” name tag, there is at least one source which claims Morgan Oyuki lived her last few decades simply, without the money and the drama associated with her earlier years. In a letter to TIME Magazine, a man who’d met Oyuki wrote in to protest at their typically scandal-filled report of her life:

Sir:

Your article about Mrs. George Morgan [TIME, Dec. 22] and the accompanying cut is both conceived and written in extraordinarily poor taste. Your willingness to accept the evidence of a cheap Japanese novelist is right in keeping with the tradition of yellow journalism.

At the request of her niece, Mrs. Sarah Morgan Gardner of Princeton, I located Mrs. Morgan in Kyoto in May of 1946 while serving in Japan with the Marine Corps. I found her through the St. Francis Xavier Church missionaries in that city, men who willingly testified to her devotion to the church and to the hardships she had suffered in Japan as the widow of an American. Mrs. Morgan herself, a charming elderly lady, who seemed more Occidental than Japanese, was overjoyed to hear news of her American relations, who are all devoted to her and have made every effort to see that she is taken care of. Far from being a rich woman, as intimated in your article, all her income is frozen in the United States.

Articles such as yours can do little else than make life more uncomfortable for people who are unable to answer them.

ROBERT W. LOCKE Princeton, N.J.

The TIME editor shrugged off the complaint with a bit of snark:

TIME trusts that its other readers were not equally offended by this story of Madame-Butterfly-with-a-difference. — ED.

To be fair, with the exception of suggesting that Yuki was still rich, TIME didn’t say much that wasn’t true.

Yuki Kato’s story has continued to inspire talk and rumors and novels and plays. Just last year, a new play called “Morgan O-Yuki: The Geisha of the Gilded Age” was put on at Ventfort Hall in Massachusetts, a mansion built by George Morgan’s parents. Fictionalized or not, her “Japanese Cinderella” story keeps echoing on through the decades, and who’s to say it ever has to stop?

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• TIME Magazine, the 12/22/1947, 1/19/1948, and 5/31/1963 issues.
• Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer, pp. 186-192.
• The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridan Prasso, pp. 48-9.
• Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie Groves, pp. 275-6.
• History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard, p. 422.
• “What Future For Japan?”: U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942-1945 by Rudolf V.A. Janssens, p. 317.
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/amachan_001/e/7f27c0a4e762b5f8416f1b77310fa70d
• http://www.joho-kyoto.or.jp/~wazaden/english/hito/morgan_e.html
• http://www.yorozubp.com/2011/2011/07/post-9.html
• http://uncoveringjapan.com/2013/09/25/good-eats-gogyo-kyoto/
• http://boardingarea.com/pointsmilesandmartinis/2013/09/how-a-ho…
• http://www.kyozei.or.jp/news/93/93-3.html
• http://www.nnh.to/01/20.html

Now, picture all those family trips, and merge it with memories of when your family comes to visit you at home. Have you ever moved to a new city and then acted as your family’s tour guide when they came to see you? Great—now imagine that you made a really big deal out of this city for a long time. You read books, you watched movies, you even studied a completely new language because you were so into this place. You talked about it a lot, even though maybe nobody else was particularly interested. Let’s call that place Japan (my city was Tokyo, but obviously yours might be different). Can you picture it? Now your family is coming to visit and they want you to show them around. Feel that mixture of pride and panic? What are you going to do? How is this going to work?

It’s been about three years now since this happened to me, but I still remember plenty of tidbits of wisdom from my own experience. I was studying abroad in Tokyo when my grandparents, mom, and great-aunt flew over for a ten day adventure in Japan, traveling from Tokyo to Hakone, Kanazawa, Kyoto and back, from March 6 to 16, 2011 (yes, during the Tohoku earthquake). Looking back, I can think of two major considerations that you need to think of when you do this.

1. Taking care of them (especially if they don’t know anything about the country) and…
2. Taking advantage of their company.

Let’s get started by looking at the first one.

Taking Care Of Your Family

When it comes to taking care of your family, there are three main things to think about. Food, shelter, transportation, and weather. Pretty basic, right? Still, there’s a lot of little things you have to keep in mind. It’s your family’s first trip, after all, and with the new location they may not be thinking about these things in quite the right way, so it’s your job to think for them!

Feeding Your Family:

If you’re from a culture that’s very different from Japan, food might end up being the biggest challenge. Not to mention each family member will have different tastes. My family, for example, is not fond of seafood, which makes choice in Japan pretty limiting. Maybe your family has a vegetarian or (God forbid) a vegan. Japan’s vegetarian/vegan scene is near nonexistent. There are certain Japanese foods I’ve found to be generally acceptable (at least to a Western palette) includes:

• Noodles (ramen, udon, soba)
• Donburi (a bowl of rice with some kind of meat on top)
• Tempura
• Curry (which is sweeter than Indian curry and kind of similar to stew).

Going beyond Japanese cuisine, you can usually find “Western” options like Italian or steak restaurants, although it will be fairly different from what your family is used to. In the bigger cities, you may recognize some Western chain restaurants (and of course, that includes McDonalds).

Quick Tips:

• Be careful with the curry restaurants—they leave a strong impression. My mother is convinced that curry is all we ate.
• Sometimes Japanese-language menus have different prices than English ones, so if you can read Japanese you may want to get at least one Japanese menu.
• If you do, watch out for the katakana. I accidentally ordered raw beef on the trip because I didn’t connect タルタル (tarutaru) with tartare (raw beef). I ate it anyway, and now it’s a family joke.
• Convenience stores usually have something for everyone. It’s a good way to start the day for breakfast, plus they can marvel at how not sketchy things are.

If you really want to impress your family with “weird” Japanese food (it’s not weird, but your family will maybe think it is), okonomiyaki is very foreigner-friendly. Call it a Japanese Pizza or a Japanese Pancake (I’ve heard it both ways), it has a simple base of flour, egg, and shredded lettuce and is topped with mayonnaise and a sweet glaze, and you can add pretty much anything you want to it. For bonus points, make sure the restaurant has table grills so you can watch a waiter cook it in front of you and/or make it yourself. Everyone can order something different and cut their pancake into pieces to share. I took my family to a restaurant like this in Shibuya on their second night, and they talk about it to this day!

If your family has dietary restrictions, first be aware that a lot of Japanese soy sauces are made with gluten, and they are used in a lot of dishes. Restaurants and waitstaff may not be very familiar with gluten allergies, so people with sensitivity to gluten should exercise their own judgement when eating out. Vegetarians may need to do the same, because I’ve seen waiters recommend “肉なし” (niku nashi–no meat) dishes that had fish or even processed meat. “Niku nashi” ramen or other soups may have beef or fish broth. (Nobody’s trying to trick anyone, it’s just that not everyone shares the same idea of what constitutes meat). You can usually find more tips for working around these issues in travel guides and on blogs like NeverEndingVoyage.com.

Where To Stay:

As for hotels, keep in mind the age and health of the people you’re traveling with! My friends and I had a blast at a ryoukan in Nikkou, but you should probably avoid Japanese-style rooms if you are traveling with older people. If they didn’t grow up sleeping on the floor, it will probably be too hard on their backs and joints now. For the same reason, you may want to be aware of how close your hotel is to public transportation to avoid long walks.

Quick Tips

• You may want to double-check whether your proposed hotel is meant for business travelers, particularly if you’re sharing rooms. We ended up with a salaryman-type hotel in Kyoto and it was noticeably more cramped than our other hotels.
• If you’re traveling with younger family members then capsule hotels may be a lot of fun (for one or two nights). Keep in mind that the bath may be shared. Some people aren’t going to be comfortable with that.

While I like to think that a hotel is just a place to sleep between activities, there’s a couple of general pointers I’d like to throw out there. First, Japanese hotels tend to be smaller than their Western counterparts. Second, hotels that come with breakfast are awesome. Usually (but not always) the breakfasts are quite nice. Third, in general, hotels near main stations are going to be pricey when compared to their quality. If you stay at a hotel next to a station that isn’t the biggest in the city, or if you are able to stay somewhere a little further from the station, prices are going to drop down a bit. Just depends on how much money you want to spend!

How To Travel:

You can travel in Japan by foot, bicycle, car, taxi, or airplane… but train is by far the easiest and most efficient when it’s available (and it’s available a lot). Foreign tourists can and should buy the Japan Rail Pass, which offers unlimited passage on JR trains, including the shinkansen (bullet train) for 7, 14, or 21 consecutive days. There is one caveat, though: It can only be purchased outside of Japan and is invalid for non-tourist visas, so if you are studying abroad or working in Japan, no JR Pass for you. Use the online route planner at Hyperdia.com to figure out which train you want and what transfers you may need to take, then make your free seat reservations at the JR office in any major train station. The best guide I’ve seen for the JR Pass can be found here.

There are also going to be times where it may be worth taking a taxi. Grandma can’t walk as much as she used to, after all. Split between several family members the cost isn’t too terrible, though it is definitely going to be more expensive than taking the train. Taxis are everywhere, but just make sure you know where you want to go. A surprising number of taxi drivers seem to not know their cities very well. That being said, taxis are plentiful. If you find them lacking, though (maybe you’re visiting someplace pretty inaka aka the countryside) you can find taxi phone numbers inside of phone booths or you can simply ask the clerk at a convenience store to call a taxi service for you. Make sure to buy a bottle of tea or an onigiri as a way to say arigato.

How To Pack:

My grandparents are well-traveled and usually take one big bag for the two of them on their trips, so they were a little skeptical when I told them to bring a carry-on sized bag for each of them. It’s easier to maneuver on the shinkansen, subway, and buses, and lighter to carry (or wheel) if and when you need to walk part of the way to the hotel. Not to mention the crowded subway and train stations – A giant bag like that will just get in the way. I think they admitted I was right when we had to walk up a mountain in Hakone.

As for what to pack, the only special advice I gave my family was to bring their own medications (you can get things like basic painkillers in Japan, of course, but the dosages are different) hygiene products, and to not worry too much about forgetting anything else, because you can probably buy it in Japan. They were seriously worried when I told them a lot of shrines, temples, and other sites don’t have toilet paper in their bathrooms though, and packed a good supply of personal tissues (but if you spend a lot of time in a big city like Tokyo, you’ll probably pick up a collection of free personal tissues anyway).

I also recommended to my family to bring a little less than they think they need. There are washers and dryers in most hotels. Plus, if you find yourself running out of tshirts or underwear, there’s always a Uniqlo nearby to get you through a couple more days. You’re also going to surely bring back a lot of things too. That means extra space in your suitcase will help your family to accommodate the purchases made along the way. Keeping everything in that one carry-on suitcase will make those mountain treks all the more pleasant.

Seasons & Weather:

Finally, think about the weather! This will really depend on where your family is from and what they’re used to, but I’ll try my best. My mom, for example, refuses to ever travel to Japan again in March because it was “too cold,” so maybe she’d like something a little warmer. That being said, your family may be from Greenland, so avoiding August may be a good idea (you may be shocked at hot hot and humid Japan can get). Here are some general tips about the weather. Please adjust accordingly to your family’s preferences.

January, February, March: New Years is a lot of fun and something your family may enjoy. That being said, it’s pretty cold. But, if your family can deal with the cold, it also happens to be one of the driest, sunniest times of the year for Japan. Plus, after New Years tourist spots are less crowded. It’s a win-win unless you can only do warmer weather. The Northern half of Japan is probably getting some snow. Hokkaido is probably buried in it.

April: Cherry blossom season is happening. There’s a little more rain, but in general it’s pretty sunny (though still kind of cold). It’s warmer than January-March, for sure, but only just by a little. The end of April is Golden Week, so if you don’t like crowds and lots of people traveling, avoid this time.

May: The beginning of May is also Golden Week. Same thing applies: Lots of people are traveling, lots of places are crowded. That being said, after Golden Week everyone goes back to their regular lives and the weather is pretty nice. Not too hot, not too cold. Slightly rainier, but not super rainy (unless you’re down in Okinawa, then expect some rain).

June, July, August: Welcome to rainy season. It’s going to be overcast and rainy, so this might be something worth avoiding. June/July is a nice time to visit Hokkaido. After the rainy season (early or mid June) it becomes hot and humid. Like, really hot and humid. July and August are not good times for people who don’t like heat and humidity. Note that typhoon season really gets going in August.

September, October: These two months tend to consist of more typhoons. It’s not constant typhoon after typhoon, but they can put a damper on your travel plans. Usually by mid or late October the typhoons stop, making October a nice time to travel (once the humidity breaks, anyways). It’s hard to know exactly when this will happen, but second half of October is a pretty good bet.

November, December: Like January – March, these months are fairly dry and not rainy. The temperature is usually a little warmer in November too, making it a nice time to travel. Some warm-weather loving families won’t be too pleased with the weather, but the lack of rain and the lack of freezing temperatures make it a pretty safe bet to travel. December is more of the same, though colder. It does lead up to New Years though, which is fun!

For a full breakdown of weather, month-by-month, be sure to visit Japan-Guide’s When To Travel page.

For my family, when they came in March it was too cold for them (thank goodness they didn’t come November-February!). There was still snow at the time, and waiting in line to get into museums and other tourist attractions wasn’t their idea of fun. We even rode some tourist buses in a full circle, waiting for the lines to die down (then we got out and went inside the museum).

Taking Advantage Of Your Family (Not Just Paying For Things)

Photo Jim G

Before my family came to visit, I had already been to Kanazawa and Kyoto, so I can say this having experienced both sides: while you and your friend may try to play it cool on your backpacking trip (fooling no one, by the way), when you’re with your family, there is no way to look less like a tourist. Give up and embrace it. There are lots of embarrassingly touristy things to do that can actually be pretty fun.

First of all, embrace the tours and tour guides, in whatever form they come in. In Nara my friend and I avoided the volunteers at Nara Station out of a mix of bashfulness and youthful desire to somehow seem less touristy. My grandparents possessed neither sentiment and off we went, trailing behind an energetic English-speaking retiree who literally took us to every temple and shrine in the city (apparently they form a convenient circuit, which my friends and I never realized on that first trip).

Besides seeing even more temples, I learned more about the history of each, found out how to make the deer bow, and for some reason took a picture with a mother and her newborn son in traditional christening attire. In Kyoto, my friends and I explored the geisha district, but missed a lot of key information and major sites that was later covered on the walking tour my grandparents signed us up for. I’m not saying my friends and I did it wrong the first time; I’m just saying it can be easier to do these potentially corny or embarrassing things with family.

It turns out that a lot of Japanese people are very proud of their culture and keen to show it off to interested tourists. Once I started going around with my pack of relatives, a surprising number of people came over to chat or went out of their way to show us something interesting. One woman approached us in a public park and asked if we would be interested in seeing traditional Japanese wedding clothes—her son and his fiancé would soon be coming to take their engagement photos. And frankly, as awkward as I found the offer at the time, it was pretty much the only chance I had during my year in Japan to see something like that. I even found out that the groom was an alumni of the school I was studying at.

What I’m trying to say is, even though my family’s enthusiasm and eagerness (for some reason) embarrassed me, their openness and interest appealed to a lot of people we met and gave me a chance to see and experience a side of Japan I didn’t see as an exchange student. Although acting as a 24-hour tour guide sometimes felt like herding cats, traveling with my family was a fun way to rediscover Japan and show them what the big deal was. And despite a looming nuclear meltdown overshadowing the last half of the trip, everybody still says it was one of the best they’ve ever been on.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Japanese × Non Asian = 1/2 = Good looking”.

Not too long ago you read Loco’s guest post on what it’s like to be a “half child” in Japan. By reading that article you’ll learn it’s not always great to be a “half” child in Japan, sadly. However, many Japanese girls long for the appearance of a “half”; big eyes, long eye lashes, tall and sharp noses, etc… Since I married a Canadian, I bet you can guess the most common reaction I get from Japanese people.

“Oh, you married a Canadian (a white guy)? Then your child will be”half” and most likely be so cute. Jealous!”

Actually, whenever I talk to someone about my marriage for the first time, 90% or more of their reactions are the same. I personally think that it’s fairly ridiculous to say that your baby will be good looking before knowing other things, like if my husband is attractive or not, but it’s probably just a form of small-talk that people come up with.

“Half” Taking Over Television

This “half=cute” belief has probably been strengthened by those good looking idols on TV who are know to be “half”. I wouldn’t be going too far if I were to say that there has recently been a “half” baby-boom rippling across Japan. In fact, there have been so many “half” celebrities on TV over the passed few years that people often get confused who is who. Some of those celebrities even complain about how commonly it occurs. In fact, check out this “Half” special that was aired recently.

Not only TV viewers but also those who work in television sometimes believe that there are too many “half” girls and some are worried about losing their position to them. The famous comedian Hiroyuki Ariyoshi, who is known for flat-out-mean jokes, discussed this concern on his own radio program called SUNDAY NIGHT DREAMER and he said some nerd-comedians (“Nerd” because that is the actual style they attempt to portray) are losing their positions on television to these “half” girls.

The rise of cute “half” girls’ exposure is partly because there are more mixed-race kids in Japan than there used to be. According to this “List of Statistical Surveys conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare”, the number of international marriages in Japan (Japanese with non-Japanese) in the 70’s was just 5,500, but it rapidly increased in the 80’s when the Japanese economy started bubbling up. Although it peeked in 2006 (nearly 45,000 couples), there were still 23,657 international marriages last year which is over 4 times that of the 70’s.

But, this doesn’t necessarily explain the disproportionate amount of “half” celebrities on television. Some of it probably comes from the number of “half” children out there, but I wonder if some of it comes from the multi-racial families that they come from. Japanese people are generally known to be fairly shy and timid, which isn’t very good for television. However, many non-Japanese ethnicities are known to be much more outgoing and “friendly”, which is good for television. The way that “half” children are raised probably makes more of them more outgoing than the average Japanese (as we saw in Loco’s article, mentioned above). So, not only are they especially “good looking” with their “half”-look, but they’re also more outgoing too. What a perfect combination for a television personality! Of course, this is only just me thinking out loud, but it seems fairly plausible in some situations.

Transformers

The more that pretty “half” girls are exposed, the more that Japanese girls will want to look like them. Although there may be some Japanese guys who pine for that “half” look, most of them don’t put makeup on themselves, so it’s harder for them to change their appearance (unless they want to be made fun of for wearing makeup).

Girls, on the other hand, are very makeup capable and some of them are very persistent in their quest look like “half” girls. Those wanna-be-half girls have created various ways to look like like they’re “half” or non-Japanese and keep posting how-to videos on Youtube, some being quite popular. I’d like to introduce some of their makeup methods today. It’s pretty impressive how drastically they can change their appearance!

God Make Ayano Saito’s “Half” Face Makeup

nuts×GODMakeup.

Naokoの秋のハーフ顔メイク！(Naoko’s “half” face makeup for fall)

“Half” face makeup

After watching these videos it’s clear that the features you have concentrate on are the eyebrows and the eyes. Since Asian faces are flatter compared to non-Asian people’s, it’s important to make your facial features more 3D. Here’s some things that they tend to do to achieve this:

• Drawing their eyebrows thicker.
• Make the space between their eyebrows and eyes narrower.
• Make the inside tip of the eyebrow a little thicker so that it looks less flat.
• Apply many grades of eye shadow, thickener.
• Create longer eye-lines.
• Apply highlight to their nose lines to make them appear taller.

In addition to “3D-ifying” their face, color contacts and fake eyelashes seem to be a staple of their tool kit. If you think about it, there’s nothing that says “half” or “not Japanese” like eyes that aren’t dark brown.

When Makeup Isn’t Enough

I’m not totally sure how much time they spend putting their makeup on, but it seems to be quite a lot. I don’t typically use makeup myself, except for special occasions, so I admire their passion for this and the time and effort they put forth. However, there are some people who want to look like a “half” but consider it too troublesome to spend so much time on makeup. For those people, there are many plastic surgeons who provide “half-looking” or “foreigner-looking” facial reconstructive surgeries. Takasu Clinic is one of them and you can see their ad for that kind of surgery.

But, paying for these surgeries can be expensive. It is surgery after all! This woman paid over $100,000 to look more Western. It turned out fairly well, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t many problems or mistakes that get made along the way.

I’m really not sure if I can agree with doing this – you should enjoy how you look and be happy with what you’ve been given. But, I can’t pretend to know how people think, it is their bodies after all. I mean, there are some surgeries that make you look more “Western” but also have some practicality as well. For example, getting a surgery to change your eyelids to a double lid is fairly popular. This makes your eyes bigger which makes you look more Western. Plus, when you get older you’ll be able to see because your eyelids won’t be drooping so much as they start to sag.

Beyond things like that, though, it’s taking this craze a little too far, I think. What if one day you wake up and you’ve suddenly changed your mind? Or what if you go into surgery and they mess up completely? The negatives are just too great. Plus, you should be happy with how you look!

Giving It A Try

After getting all judgemental on you, it’s time to make a U-turn and try some of this myself. I don’t usually put makeup on (as I mentioned above), but we’ve just seen a lot of tips so I thought “why don’t I try one of them.”

There’s a problem, though… I don’t have any of those makeup staples, such as color contacts or fake eyelashes. Thankfully there is Photoshop, though, so I hit up my virtual makeup artist Aya. Are you ready? Here I go, I’m about to become “half”.

Here’s without makeup

Here’s a little makeup “added”

Now I look half?

Two thirds?

The first thing I did when I looked at the pictures above was to say “OMG!” and then laugh. I felt very strange to see myself looking like that. Well, I like the second one, but in the last two pictures where I put the color contacts in and dyed my hair….they looked kind of scary. I forwarded them to my parents and they laughed, too. This experiment turned out to be a great excuse for me to stick with black hair and brown eyes. I like being “natural”, after all.

The second picture also made me imagine our future daughter. I don’t have any kids now, but if I had a daughter, she might look kind of like her. Thank God my husband doesn’t have blue eyes or blond hair, so I guess she won’t look like the scary ones…as long as she doesn’t put this kind of make-up on!

Bonus Wallpapers!

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2013. Yasufumi Ono made comments about the state of Japanese gaming at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto. Currently, Japan controls a mere 30% of the market share in North America and only 13% worldwide. The horn of plenty has become a trombone of self-doubt. Why isn’t the world buying Japanese games anymore? Has Japan lost its touch?

There are several factors at play here. When Japan swooped in to grasp the field mouse that was U.S. gaming, that mouse was dead. Thankfully Japan brought the mouse back to life and became the sole devourer of its innards. Today there is more than one falcon-country eyeing those rodent intestines, namely the U.S., South Korea, and Finland.

Also, Japan doesn’t make the games that western countries presently want to play, games in the “Call of Battlefield: Ghost Ops II” category. Japan makes games more along the lines of Dungeon Monster DX: The Fire! Time was, you could take your Dungeon Monster games and package them so your average Todds and Brandons would buy them. That’s been a challenge Japan has yet to surmount in this modern era. But why is this such a challenge if it wasn’t before?

Instant Connection

When we hear a story, our mind does its best to connect us to the story’s main character. We want to get to know that character so we can become the hero and experience the tale explicitly. In traditional storytelling, this is no easy task. It takes a witch’s brew of situation, exposition, and time to make a character connection with an audience. And few writers ever know what’s going to work in a given story.

Video games don’t have this problem. It’s a unique storytelling medium. The connection a game character has to the player is almost immediate. My go-to storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, best explains why, by summarizing philosophy first put forth by Marshall McLuhan:

When driving, for example, we experience much more than our five senses report. The whole car—not just the parts we can see, feel and hear—is very much on our minds at all times. The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car. If one car hits another, the driver of the vehicle being struck is much more likely to say: “Hey! He hit me!!” than “he hit my car!” or “his car hit my car,” for that matter.

So, in touching and controlling the car, your mind makes the car an extension of yourself. The same happens when playing a game. That touch of the controller and your control over the avatar gives your mind the same connection. The hero is a virtual extension of you. You become the hero as soon as you start the game.

This explains why games with subpar stories can still be great games. Your connection to the experience is immediate and doesn’t require a fantastic story to draw you in. If the game is enjoyable, you keep playing because you like your role as the hero. But what happens when you don’t like the hero you become?

Different Heroes For Different Hemispheres

Back to the Inifinity Ventures Summit (we were talking about that, right?). Some interesting statements were made by Sega/Sammy president, Hajime Satomi. Read below his hypothesis on why Japanese games fail to make an impact in the U.S. And Europe:

Europeans and North Americans like strong people, so the main character has to be a fully-grown, middle-aged man. On the other hand, in Asia, people like stories about middle or high school students growing up or becoming stronger. As you make games for more dedicated players, I think you have to be aware of those differences.

This makes sense when you consider characters from best-selling games in the U.S. from the past ten years: Kratos, Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Niko Bellic, Marcus Fenix, and that hooded guy from Assassin’s Creed. All severely grizzled, middle-aged combat types.

Compare that with some of Japan’s top character picks, plucked from a Famitsu poll of readers’ favorite characters: Link, Sora, Yuri Lowell, Sakura Shinguji, and Cloud Strife. All very ungrizzled and full of youthful optimism for the adventures of life (until they enter the job market).

There is some crossover, of course. Both east and west love Chris Redfield, Solid Snake, Link and Cloud. But there is something to Satomi’s ideas. There is clearly a difference in hero preference between hemispheres.

So if Japan once ruled the western gaming market, they must have created games with middle-aged heroes. Not necessarily.

Let’s Compare Some Box Art!

This is a simple exercise. I will present three games released both in Japan and the U.S. We will observe the in-game pixelated sprites that represent the main character(s) and the art on the boxes for the Japanese and U.S. releases of the game. Let’s begin.

DOWNTOWN NEKKETSU MONOGATARI vs. RIVER CITY RANSOM

The in-game character looks pretty cartoony. Could be any age.

Japanese Box Art:

The Japanese release of the game suggests the characters are young high school students.

US Box Art:

But the U.S. release suggests they are weird 36-year-old dudes! Despite that “River City High School” sign behind them, these two are clearly just there to pick up their kids from baseball practice.

ROCKMAN 2 vs. MEGA MAN 2

The age-neutral Mega Man sprite we know and love.

Japanese Box Art:

Japan gets some great art that actually looks a good deal like our robot friend on the screen.

U.S. Box Art:

America gets a welder with a broken foot and ray gun. He’s a weirdo, but he’s a grown-up combat weirdo!

DRAGON QUEST II vs. DRAGON WARRIOR II

Here’s the in-Game Characters – Japan & U.S.

These in-game characters could be impetuous teens or seasoned adventurers.

Japanese Box Art:

The art for Dragon Quest II features Akira Toriyama’s youthful depictions of the heroes, which have become a staple of the series.

U.S. Box Art:

The American release of Dragon Warrior II is, again, a band of fully-grown adults. These heroes promised each other in college that when they turned 40, they would reunite for a quest to Las Vegas.

Finding Ourselves

So what does this box art comparison mean, exactly? I’ll get to that in a second.

The heroes on our TV screens during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were less defined and more iconic, and thus more easily interpreted. I touched on this in my article about Hello Kitty, so for a more detailed and Tom Hanks-oriented explanation of icons.

But there was another force at play, helping us interpret our pixel friends. That force is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the psychological effect of your mind to favor information that coincides with your preconceptions. Traditionally, confirmation bias is used to describe how we gather information to make rational (or irrational) decisions. Recently, however, a young philosophy blogger named Sam McNerney introduced this idea:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making…With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments… Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Since the pixelated hero images transmit so little information as to what they are, players needed the box art to confirm their bias of what they wanted to see, in this case, their bias of what they think, aesthetically, a hero should look like. Japanese gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is a youngling,” and the box art confirmed their bias. Western gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is muscular manbeast,” and their different box art confirmed their different bias.

Since video games, as we said earlier, offer an instant connection for the player, it is imperative that the player like that connection. Giving players the chance to connect to the heroes they wanted to be helped to ensure they would not put down the controller and, furthermore, keep buying games.

The Beginning Of The End

So that’s it. Everyone was happy, and all it took was paying two artists to do the same job. It’s easier to sell people what they expect than to challenge their perceptions. Unfortunately, this box art trick got harder to pull off as console gaming entered the world of polygons in 1995. Keeping the hero’s in-game appearance ambiguous got a little trickier.

Such was the case with The Legend of Zelda‘s transition from 2D to 3D. For the most part, early polygonal models could still be interpreted by both cultures as the heroes they wanted to be. And so it was with 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. EVERYONE loved this game. The main character, Link, started out as a kid but later grew into an adult. But what kind of adult? A grizzled one, probably.

How old is this adult Link? Fifteen or thirty-five?

When the first Zelda game for the 128-bit Gamecube was announced, Americans eagerly anticipated their powerful adult Link to appear in new, beautifully rendered 12 million polygons per second! It was at this point Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to have Link represented as a very cartoony boy child in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Americans went nuts. Angry nuts! Link had always been an elfin lad since the very beginning, according to the series’ story, but in pixel world and the American mind, he was nice and grizzled. For the first time, gamers were faced with a Link they could not interpret to their liking. Despite The Wind Waker being a gaming triumph, it sold a mere 3.07 million copies worldwide, compared to Ocarina of Time’s 7.6 million.

It was around this time, Japan’s control over the gaming industry began to wane. Of course, it was not solely due to the unambiguous heroes. The Xbox launched with incredible success in 2001, eating away at a large part of the North American market share previously held by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. American video game companies, having learned from two decades of great Japanese games, started making games just as good or better. The spike in popularity that Japanese pop culture saw in 1999 was diminishing by the mid 2000’s, banishing anime from general acceptance back to the cavern of the nerds, which also meant the unmistakably Japanese video game heroes were banished as well (unless they were grizzled).

In our modern era, we have our two camps making games for themselves. American game companies churning out gritty power lunks and Japanese companies churning out sleek action teens. And we like it that way, apparently. Only a small fraction from each side is interested in games from the other.

The Sun Also Rises

2014. In a few months, the next Infinity Ventures Summit will be held in Sapporo and the Japanese gaming industry will gather once again to discuss the future, the past being a non-issue. The truth is, Japan will likely never again rule the video game world as it once did. The special circumstances of an evacuated market and technology that was easily localized is gone forever. Global competition and the advent of mobile/social gaming has changed the industry so nobody knows what to expect anymore. (BIRDS being angry at PIGS?! Nobody saw that one coming.)

But that’s okay. Industries change. When Georges Méliès and the Edison Trust dominated the film industry, it was only a matter of time before other artists from around the world said, “I want to do that, too!” Film expanded until people loved it so much that certain individuals began making films simply as artistic expression.

The Infinity Ventures Summit is a gathering of companies, so their primary concern should be how to sucker people out of money (using video games, hopefully). But games are made by artists, so I hope when these artists gather in May, they will talk, at least individually, about how to move video games forward as medium, how to push boundaries and make something people have never seen before. There will always be success in giving people what they expect. But there is a truer reward in creating something that changes peoples’ minds.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Why doesn’t Japan like first-person shooters? Old characters and World War II, says Sega exec, by Casey Baseel
• Confirmation Bias and Art, by Samuel McNerney
• LVLs. Cultural Anxiety Features
• Famitsu’s Top 50 Video Game Characters

That’s what happened to me when I started taking photos of my stuffed Kogepan toys on my vacations. I took them with me to California, to New York City, and around the monuments and museums of Washington DC. I thought I was original and maybe a little bit odd. Then I went to post the photos online and discovered there was more than one Flickr group devoted to traveling stuffed toys.

And now, I’m kicking myself for not realizing that this was actually evidence of a huge under-served market. Sadly, I was not as brilliant as Sonoe Azuma, who three years ago opened a travel agency for stuffed toys in Japan.

It’s called Unagi Travel, and it started out because Sonoe Azuma had the same hobby I did: she took photos of her stuffed eel Unasha and blogged about it. Now Unasha serves as stuffed animal tour guide and together they’ve taken about 450 stuffed toys from all over the world on trips around Tokyo as well as excursions to other areas. Her customers are so satisfied that more than half come back for another trip, and one, a hippo named Kaba-san from Osaka, has been on six trips.

Customers can choose from various options: a tour around Tokyo including Asakusa, Meiji Jingu Shrine and Tokyo Tower, a one-day tour to an onsen, a weekend in Kyoto, and special tours that are sometimes offered, including to the Tohoku region. While you follow along via social media, your stuffed animal will see the sights and learn about Japanese culture, like calligraphy:

…and have Japanese meals that you will envy:

If your toy is a real free spirit, you can surprise it with a Mystery Tour. The Mystery Tour may visit other parts of Tokyo, Azuma told us, such as Shibuya, Ginza, or Roppongi, or places in nearby prefectures such as Kawagoe or Odawara. Or it may have a cultural theme, and your toy may come home knowing more than you do about architecture of the Meiji period or bronze statues.

Tours are limited to ten so everyone gets enough personal attention. You’re assured that your animal will never be placed directly on the ground, and asked whether your toy has any food allergies, whether it gets seasick or carsick, and if there’s anything in particular your creature wants to see or do on the tour.

The form that customers fill out also asks how long you’ve been together and has you tell something about the toy’s character. Along with the photos, the answers to these questions often show up on Unagi’s Facebook page, so it’s fun to follow even if you’re not sending a toy on a trip yourself. People have all sorts of creative stories about their toys, and there’s often the hint of interesting human stories behind them as well.

One toy from France on a recent trip was said to have been with its thirty year old owner since she was one day old, and loves chocolate and knitting. A pair of handmade cats from Nara Prefecture called Custard-san and Hana-san from Nara Prefecture were said to be on a mother-daughter trip together. They’re supportive of each other, and the mom loves to listen to enka. And a toy called Little Brother Bear was returning to Tokyo where he had lived sixty years ago.

All sorts of creatures are allowed, as long as they weigh under 250 grams, and you need to mail your toy to Tokyo. The Tokyo tour is $45; special tours cost more, like $95 for two days in Kyoto.

Do you have more questions about this? So did we. Azuma was kind enough to answer a few questions for Tofugu:

Tofugu: What kinds of toys do foreigners send? Are they different from Japanese, or does everyone like the same kind of stuffed animal?

Unagi: Foreigners tend to send us realistic animal toys, whereas Japanese tend to send us cute toys. Regardless of whether it’s from Japan or overseas, the teddy bear accounts for a large percentage.

Tofugu: What’s the most unusual toy you have taken on a tour?

Unagi: It was a Japanese spiny lobster.

Tofugu: When you go on overnight trips, how do the innkeepers feel about having stuffed animals as customers?

Unagi: Once the business understands the concept, we are very welcome.

Tofugu: Your job sounds like so much fun. What do you like about it?

Unagi: I’m happy that I can make my customers happy and energetic. For example, there was a man who applied for our trip in order to make his wife happy, who was very busy raising their child. After the trip, he gave us the feedback that our trip became a good pastime for her and she really enjoyed it. Although this is a small business, it’s very satisfying for me because I can do something for someone else. This job also requires imagination, creativity, and interpersonal skills. That part of it is also fun for me.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “What is the matter with these people? What normal adult would pay good money to send a stuffed animal on vacation?” If you don’t get the fun of this, maybe what you need are some of the heartwarming tales: One customer who was in a wheelchair wanted her toy to go down narrow alleys that she was unable to navigate. Or you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by Connor the Chemo Duck from Tennessee, a stuffed therapy animal for children with cancer, especially when he went to Senso-ji temple to fan himself with the healing smoke.

And if you’re thinking this is one of those uniquely weird Japanese things, not so fast: right now, Azuma says that half of her customers are from overseas.

There was actually once a similar business in Prague – the owner was half-Japanese, and it eventually failed, and one in Berlin seems to be hanging on, although they seem to do tours far less often. But I think there’s global potential here. I’m thinking maybe I need to open a company like this of my own. Don’t you think Japanese stuffed animals would love to come see the cherry blossoms in Washington DC?

If you’d like to send your stuffed animal on a tour of Japan, be sure to visit Unagi Travel’s website to get more information.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Links:

• http://unagi-travel.net/
• https://www.facebook.com/unagitravel
• https://twitter.com/unagitravel

References:

• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20…
• http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/japan…
• http://kotaku.com/a-japanese-trav…
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/communi…