Thoughts on EarthBound.

Just some random thoughts on EarthBound.

There might not be any better example of the juvenile video game than EarthBound, a roll playing video game published by Nintendo and directed by Shigesato Itoi. Yet EarthBound is not as popular as Pokemon, Mario or other Nintendo titles, its main character Ness come in all Nintendo Smash Brother Series. (It is commonly said that Ness has been getting weaker and weaker as the series goes on.) When you introduce the game to someone you might go like "you know that little kid with a baseball bat from Smash Bros."
But you cannot ignore the fact that plenty of fans are still out there enchanted by the game. A marvelous, heartwarming and soft kind of atmosphere that embraces the whole world view of EarthBound is just indescribable in words. It's not like a game that overwhelmingly blows your mind, it's more of a game that you gradually start to realize that it is something different and very unique as you walk through. While playing this game, at almost every corner of the road, you are to encounter with something witty. (For example, even billboards are full of humors for one that says "I won't say anything to you adults, but I would stress to you young kids, don't play for more than two hours. Anything excessive is no good. Parents Opposing Obsession Plan".)
You can say that these little tiny elements are what we call EarthBoundness. Once you get into this world, you don't feel that this game is old or anything, though it was developed more than 15 years ago, but find it very vivid and lively.


 "Magical realism views of childhood" is right there.
All the setting and the inhabitants in the game are seemingly lovely, peaceful and compelling enough to make you believe in this world that is undoubtedly pure........... until the very moment when you notice this slight level of darkness that floats the suffer of the story line.
I say that a spice of realism is added more or less to the lines that makes the game much more modern (in contrast with typical RPGs that take place in a world of sword and magic in the middle ages) and unconventional. That iconoclastic kind of design fits just right in to the game. If you distill essence of the game, that leaves those stimulating and unique things that make this game being totally different from any other kinds.


From Ness's point of view.
Adventure is always exiting as hell. You start off as a kid with a baseball hat, right after a beetle from the future tells you that you're the chosen one of four who saves the Earth with PSI power. Ness, the kid, heads off to the downtown in search for information that the beetle left which is to collect all the melodies that scattered to the four corners of the Earth. He strolls around the police office, hamburger shop, game arcade, city hall and cape, just like you do in real world. Through some conversations he makes with citizens, you realize that they don't take you as a hero or anything. You even get scolded for not going to school. Fair enough, at the age of 13, you're supposed to be in a some sort of school right? That just happens, that's how it is in here. Along the journey, Ness would be joined by three other children: a girl with blue eyes and a red ribbon on her head, a scientist child prodigy, a martial arts master apparently from Asia. As if it was meant to be so, all the children are dramatically drawn each other to come along. After that, his adventure is not anymore his own. He has friends to count on. You know how precious that is, when you have friends in a situation where you fare forth on a journey. Imagine that it's like a childhood adventure.


Why you must play it.
Many have said about Earthbound, for one its cult following (including me) are notorious in a way.
They tend to get lost when it comes to Earthbound. So it's quite understandable that why some people are keeping a distance from it, knowing that insanity. True that psychedelic kind of backgrounds in combat mode and lovely like 60's-America based fields are just co-existing in the game which might seem to be not sorted out very well.
But still, just like a good picture book you pick up for your own at a bookstore, you would see this wonderfully-twisted game is somehow in order and very heart-oriented. You'd find a beautiful principle in it.

This is my recommendation.

Thoughts on growth of the network society in Japan

Today, communication could take many forms regardless of time and space. Wide range: from analog methods such as letter and phone to digital methods such as email, facebook and twitter. Popularization of the Internet was truly revolutionary and had a wide impact on us and now it has likely changed our value. I'd like to put this into perspective, a world wide view, and put a pin on Japan, try to recognize the reason Japanese people have got to the place where it is.

The following part is how I live in daily life today, as an example of how much different it has become than before.
In the morning, as soon as I wake up, I post something like "good morning" on twitter then somebody would reply to me "morning. have a nice day" then I get motivated a little bit. When I get to some place outside, I check in on foursquare, somebody would give a comment or advice on it even though we are not that close. After coming back to home, I come down with a facebook disease. Upload photos of the day, some comments would fall down on pictures afterwards. Most of these activities could be seen publicly.

What is the point of doing these deeds?
I think, and as probably most people would likely to think, it's all about connection between you and your friends for assuring that you are not isolated from the society. This is probably a basic theory that people believe in on social networking service(SNS).
In Japan, where pre-established harmony is regarded as the most important component of society, people are, in the first place, supposed to have a sensitive perception on a society. Like how they should act to fit in to a community. They were closely formed in a tight network which originates from agricultural customs in the past. Judging from this fact, Japanese people should be able to live without SNS because they are born to live inherently close together to begin with. But they did not.

Seemingly, mixi (the largest SNS in Japan) has the key to understand how Japanese people reached this place. What mixi has done is to foster this type of society even further, not to help extent their realms of friendship but to dig deeper within it. It is not too much to say that mixi's propose was to let their members produce many closed groups. You can intuitively feel that this website is meant to be working something exclusive as it doesn't have tagging feature or anything that bothers one's closed living, compared to other SNSs. mixi regime has been predominant for a long time, not to mention 2ch's culture and attitudes were entirely blocked out by the mixi users.... well, nominally.

(Although mixi is still the most popular SNS in Japan, nobody could deny that it is slowly dying. Services that mixi has been launching lately have been just a copy of facebook features or that of twitter. A problem of lack of originality is emerged apparently.)

While mixi is still prevailing through Japan, people are meeting a new SNS like Twitter. And it has become very popular even TV programs sometimes give you a hash tag to talk about it. To be honest, it was shocking to me that Japanese people smoothly accepted the concept of twitter because I assumed that they wouldn't. Twitter's concept is, as you may know, to tweet inconsequential information within 140 characters. To my understanding, this contradicts the nature of Japanese people, because Japanese people tend to write more than the rest of the people in the world, as in fact the most written language in the whole blog of the Internet is Japanese at least as of 2006. (http://www.soumu.go.jp/iicp/chousakenkyu/data/research/survey/telecom/2008/2008-1-02-2.pdf)
And on top of that, twitter is providing relatively an open platform that is usually exposed to the whole Internet users out there, which is something that Japanese people deemed as dangerous before. But, twitter came into style. And here I am tweeting about my stuff everyday.


There are any number of reasons to explain the popularity of twitter.


One of them is, a system of micro blogging itself.
It is said that Japanese people are good at making things small and tiny. Japanese gardens are good examples, as it is a place where everything is possibly composed beautifully within a small property. Also, Haiku should be taken into consideration that is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterized by three qualities. People have puzzled over and over to make sentences better within only 15 characters. Many have experience of struggling with compressing something into a dense thing without any loss of its meaning. Twitter's limitation, up to 140 characters, may make them deliberate about their tweet before posting just like they do in Haiku activity.

Second reason is tweet. It is relatively as same function as uttering in real world, which is not as powerful as an public opinion expressed at other places. People inherently have something to persist but the oppression of society makes them hold back their feelings and opinions. Tweets are considered as "inconsequential information", it does allow you to raise any kind of topic you subconsciously want to bring up with. Tons of tweets might be an representative phenomenon of bouncing back in Japanese society.

I here see a latent phase of transition of Japanese society where they subconsciously wish to change to a society that is widely open to anyone from a closed community. Maybe a paradigm shift.


Posted at WIRED CAFE in Osaka Sta.