The Wages of Idolatry

Idol sex scandals are beamed into our living rooms as often as commercials for their new singles, so why doesn’t the disgrace hit closer to home? Every time AKB breaks their “no-boyfriend” vow, or the paparazzi catches a teen celebrity on the arm of a man, news sites and social media hold them up at arm’s length in a savage shaming masked as a civilized reaffirmation of social morals. Let this be your lesson, we say. But in our righteous zeal we overlook the bystanders caught in the flames of this witch hunt--the families themselves.

One such victim finally speaks out. Anonymously, because our “told-you-so” mindset won’t allow him a public platform, and even if it did, the backlash would be worse than suffering in silence.

The following message board thread was translated from Kamesokuhou, an aggregate site that compiles the top posts from 2chan and edits them for readability.

Just Say NO to Nukes With SKI

In 1972 boy's manga anthology Shonen Magazine changed the rules of engagement in the publishing world when it replaced the swarthy sports stars on its covers with teen cutie pie Minami Saori. The aftermath turned the idol industry into a sexual arms race barreling towards the Apocalypse, with junior high bikini models and AKB 48's spit-swapping commercial riding shotgun.

There's one group that has agreed to an armistice under the terms that they don't strip, don't do doe-eyes, and reserve the right to say NO—the Seifuku Koujo Iinkai (SKI), or Uniform Improvement Committee. Originally formed in 1992 with the pledge "To be pure, proper, and pretty," they recently rewrote their charter with a left-leaning political bent to make sweeping reforms for the country.

Their first order of business: Abolish nuclear power. 

No! No! No more nukes!

No! No! No more nukes!

I don't care if it's national policy

I can't let this one slide

You spouted lies about the danger

"No immediate health impact?" Hah! 

I don’t care if it's a wonderful invention

 They didn't teach us these words in school:

Becquerels of cevert, meltdown, turbine building

High level of microsieverts detected!

I can't forget, you nuclear proponents 

If it's so safe why don't you live there?

Look at the mess you made

You're an embarrassment to grown-ups

The generic sound of Da! Da! Datsugenpatsu, or Say NO! To Nukes may not pose a challenge to the pop music status quo, but pick away the cotton-candy auditory fluff and you'll find a string of zingers begging to be retweeted. And with gaffe-happy politicians like ex-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano "No immediate health impact" Yukio feeding them material, they'll never be short of targets to attack.

Although the rabble-rousing is somewhat of a publicity stunt, it's for a good cause. Last August the girls sponsored an anti-nuke concert at the Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall located a short march from the National Diet Building. Proceeds from the single were donated to the Fukushima dairy farmers forced to slaughter their cows producing radioactive milk. Too late in life for a career change and having lost everything in the blink of an eye, some of the elderly chose suicide rather than beg for handouts from the government that betrayed them. 

Group leader Hashimoto Mika

The girls have managed to sell around 3100 copies of the album to date but their good intentions are only worth just under a million yen—a pittance compared to major acts. This is precisely the criticism levied against the industry by SKI president and former member Hashimoto Mika. She disses AKB48 as empty-headed "dolls" who have sold out their personal values for the sake of record sales. To Hashimoto, celebrities and performers in AKB's position should make efforts to influence popular opinion, not simply ride it out for the cash. She sees musical genres not as categories but a type of segregation. Who says that idols don't have meaningful things to say about the issues?

Indeed, this call for social revolution through song harkens back to the musician activists of the Zenkyoto student protests from the 60's and 70's, where Panta from the anarchist folk band Zuno Keisatsu (Brain Police) launched incendiary speeches at Red Army rallies. While students armed themselves with wooden 2-by-4s and construction helmets, his group bandied acoustic guitars, bongos, and provocative poetry. Their first LP was immediately banned for its cover art featuring the still at-large criminal who pulled off a bank heist disguised as a police officer, not to mention the politically-charged anthems, Declaration of World War and Grab Your Guns. 

Grab your guns and shout/ Who has the right to judge us?

Grab your guns and shout/ Who spoiled this great land?

The ignorant laughs of the ignorant fools

Echo through this country shackled in lies

Grab your guns and shout/ We won't be fooled

By their fairytales anymore

Those bastards just don't get it

Can't even stand to look at them

Panta and Hashimoto

Zuno Keisatsu went through a series of breakups and revivals over the years. Like an old war hero who knows he's past his prime, Panta put the project on the back burner to focus on his true calling—educating the next generation of revolutionaries. The beaming, snaggle-toothed smiles of SKI provide the saccharine coating needed to swallow his bitter pill of change.

There's a lot (of power brokers)/ In the world who hate (to see people happy)/ Fat cats and their money

At some point (the dojo loach Noda)/ Got out of hand (and big in the head)/ Bribes and collusion their life's work

Your promises are no good / Your policies are no good/ Your cabinet is no good/ It's all no good

Laugh it up (just a lapdog) for Mr. Obama (profits first)/ Too elite for common sense

Your bipartisanship (split up power)/ You don't do a thing (for the quake victims) / Eating free lunches from the relief money 

Hippie peaceniks forming angry drum circles are easy enough for a political to dismiss. But when you have a gaggle of schoolgirls wagging their fingers at you for being a bad, bad man, you know your political days are numbered. Akuma/Noda/TPP is the hot single from SKI's aptly-titled new album, "The Protester," which tackles both domestic and international issues. The track Save the Children aims to raise awareness of the Vietnamese villages America bombed with Agent Orange, while Hate the Crime (Not the Criminal) spreads a message of peace through justice, not vengeance—and having the heads of top TEPCO executives on a platter is the only acceptable form of justice.

If there's a good cause, chances are SKI is championing it, no matter how trivial. Assuming their uniforms had sleeves, they'd roll them up in support of the pedestrian smoking ban, cell phone usage restriction law, and citizen activists for the improvement of bicycle safety and manners. More controversial was their involvement in the signature campaign for the 1997 Anti-Stalking Law that sought to fight organized harassment and cyber bullying from Sokka Gakkai, the Buddhist cult-turned-political-party with more clout than competing fringe groups, namely the Social Democratic Party.

The SDP could only be viewed as radical in a country as conservative as Japan. Their current platform calls for the abolishment of nuclear power in favor of wind energy, the dismantling of U.S. army bases, and absolute adherence to the non-military clause of Article 9 of the constitution—all goals shared with SKI. The two have been holding hands ever since the Anti-Stalking Law brought them together, with SDP and Japanese Communist Party newsletters promoting SKI events. 

Having friends in high places is nice when you have big dreams. And boy, can SKI ever dream. Their recent press release reminds us that, if the politicians aren't listening, we need to cut them out of the equation by redirecting the flow of money from capital hill to the citizen lowlands as follows:

1) Create a self-sufficient network.

2) Manage your own money and stop depositing it into financial institutions.

3) Create a new bank free of sovereign debt.

4) Create an organization (or political party) whose members are free to run the country, no strings attached. Leverage this group to smash the opposition in elections and assume majority control to return sovereign control to the citizens. If we don't go this far, it will be business as usual with an administration that can't even rebuild the areas stricken by the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami.

Lofty as these goals may be, the government seems to be cracking under the combined weight of protest, one dissenting body at a time. Last September, Noda revealed his intentions to wean Japan off nuclear power and onto renewable energy over a 30-year period. 

It's still much too early to feel optimistic about this statement for it hints at an even more immediate problem in the nation’s future—a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint. But two can play the lobbyist game. It's only a matter of time before Big Energy hires AKB48 producer Akimoto to preen their multi-million dollar multi-member PR camp. The next wave of social-issue idols will be doing the can-can to Kick the Kyoto Protocol and winking that Natural Gas is the Natural Choice. Better start preparing for the imminent sexual meltdown before it's too late.
  

Wave Jack Series: Fighting Piracy With Pin-Up Girls

Video game companies have always been designing schemes to encourage consumers to purchase their software mint in the shrink wrap and discourage piracy.  Before first day pre-order bonuses, before Working Design pack-ins, before Star Tropic had you dip the manual in water, there was the Wave Jack series.

Published by Imagineer for the Famicom Disk System, these open-ended titles pushed passive players to be more proactive in searching out clues, not only in the 8-bit world itself, but also in the materials included with the disk. These ranged from simple maps to detailed guidebooks by living gaming legends to music cassettes featuring trending idols. A promising project on paper, in execution the trilogy was a buggy, unfriendly, unbeatable mess not unlike Atari’s Swordquest experiment. 

The adventure kicked off on November 6th, 1986 with Ginga Densho, aka Galaxy Odyssey. Set in a distant future of space colonies and interstellar travel, an ominous meteor shower rains down an unknown skin-calcifying virus, and you must scour the galaxy in search of the cure. Each of the five planets begins with a vertical-scroll shooting stage where you gather oxygen for the top-down exploration segment set deep within the alien star. 

The Guardian Legend this ain’t. Spaceship sequences feel tacked-on and half-baked compared to competent contemporaries like Super Star Force which was released just a week afterward. The exploration bits are hamstrung by finite oxygen resources, copy-pasted screens, and game-freezing bugs, making this a kusoge by our modern rubric. Despite its fatal flaws, the opulent packaging drummed up enough interest to move a few units.   

Relatively unknown sci-fi manga artist Okazaki Tsuguo provided the character designs while teen superstar Oginome Yoko lent her voice to the theme song Romantic Odyssey. The lyrics, in conjunction with the instruction manual written as a prose novella, supposedly contain clues for deciphering the in-game space runes left behind by extinct civilizations—a DIY Al Bhed primer. There’s even a 10-page pamphlet from the Japanese Psychoeducational Institute extolling the benefits of these mental gymnastics on a growing mind to scam parents into buying more edutainment for their family computer.  

Imagineer’s sophomore effort, Kieta Princess (Missing Princess) is considered the strongest entry in the trilogy, albeit a confusing mess. The princess of the imaginary country Rabia (or Labia, depending on how you romanize it) is kidnapped during a goodwill visit to Japan, putting the kibosh on trade—specifically, the vaccine for an incurable virus running rampant across the archipelago. As a private eye employed by the government, you have thirty days to find the missing princess and restore international relations.

Thirty in-game days, mind you. The clock ticks forward relentlessly as you scramble for clues and resources in a completely free-roaming world. You can interact with nearly every building on the congested map, go to the martial arts dojo to boost your life total, or even take on a part-time job to supplement your daily stipend. But don’t dawdle. Come nightfall, shops close and the streets are overrun by pistol-toting gangs. Get too trigger-happy in self-defense and you’ll be arrested and slapped with a fine.

Missing Princess tried to do more than the infant technology could handle. Years later, once hardware grew up to fit the design, sandbox games become a cornerstone of the medium. Until then, players were left to sift through the litterbox. 

At least they didn’t have to dig in with their bare hands. The package came with a police badge notebook, map of the city (whose backside served as a poster of the game’s token idol), travel log by Mori Meijin (mousy rival to Takahashi Meijin), and vocal tracks by actress Tomita Yasuko who had recently been launched to stardom by her role in Lonely Heart (Sabishinboh) by Hausu director Obayashi Nobuhiko. 

Finally we have Holy Sword Psycho Calibur, the most competent of the trifecta for what it's worth. Released on May 15th, 1987, this quest puts you in control of a young orphan on a journey to find his father and unravel the secret of his mother’s memento, an ancestral sword. Aided by the fairies Pipi and Popo, you must make the sacred blade shine once more to free the land from the Demon Lord Hrungnir and his hundred-year rule of terror.   

Don’t let the flip-screen overhead view and sword-slinging fool you—this isn’t Zelda’s long-lost cousin, it’s the mutant twin confined to rot in the attic. Right from the offset the player is asked to purchase equipment that will make or break their adventure without any explanation or context, making it a blind crap shoot amongst an already aimless sprawl. Good thing there’s pack-in guides, right?

Well, not so much. There’s a storybook illustrating the history of the realm, a Bikkuri-Man style monster manual, and cassette tape soundtrack needed to solve the musical Lost Woods riddle hiding the true last boss. Very fancy, but not useful in divining what items do. Do cherries restore health? (No, they’re actually bombs.) Is it worth dropping all your rubles on a teardrop? (Yes, it’s an over-powered boomerang). The game is still playable if you factor in the vintage. Do you enjoy the perilous learning curve of Rougelikes and poor hit detection of lazy programming? Then you’re in for an import gaming treat.

The rest of us can enjoy the totally sweet cassette illustration by Kamen Rider Black RX monster designer Amemiya Keita and the screamin’ saxophone accompanying smalltime idol unit Poppins on Springtime in the City Means Adventure. 

Citing low sales given the high production costs, Imagineer pulled the plug on the Wave Jack series after just three titles. Their 5000 yen price tag—normally reserved for cartridge games—was highway robbery compared to other Disk System offerings. Thanks to the proliferation of disk writers, you could download new games for 500 yen a pop at the corner store after an initial 2000 yen investment for the blank disk. With A+ titles like Castlevania, Kid Icarus, and Metroid at their fingertips, kids would be insane to spend their lunch money anywhere else. Even idols, normally the sexy deciding factor in the war for young boys’ pocket money, lost their luster in light of bootleg porn games, including Bishojo SF Alien Fight and other NSFW titles. 

Ironically, Wavejack’s pack-ins were originally devised to fight such unlicensed disks through added value. Rogue agents quickly figured out how to bypass Nintendo’s lax copy protection systems, with the Disk Worker from Hacker International being the workhorse of choice for counterfeiters. The Famicom homebrew scene hit a growth spurt with mooks dedicated to Disk System mods, blurring the line between hobbyist and hacker pirate. 

Despite the ease of piracy and format obsolescence from advances in ROM carts, the Disk System enjoyed a robust life cycle, cranking out titles and providing disk writing services through 1993, three full years after the release of the Super Famicom. The Wavejack series is a fondly remembered footnote in Japan for what it could have been, while hardly known in the west due to the language barrier. Still, there’s enough clues scattered across the internet to start hearty enthusiasts down the right path. After all, a journey isn’t an adventure unless it’s into the unknown. 

Special thanks to Mind Rot for introducing me to Poppins and putting this post into motion.
Images of packaging and pack-ins taken from StrategyWiki.