autumn tactics

Japan is SOO polite, that even the toilet paper rolls thank you for using them when you’re done.

“まいどありがとうございます。” == “We appreciate your business.”

Today I’m home sick. Somewhere along with the weather changes and brief slowdown (read: not crazy busy) at work, I got a fever and my throat decided to close up shop for a couple days.

So this morning I spent a few minutes sitting in the sun out on my balcony with a cup of rooibos tea while talking to my plants. Now I am bundled up at the PC with another cup of rooibos, a pot of okayu, and vapor rub on my throat (but no E, unfortunately). What you get is a day of me tidying up my photography folder and another one of my seasonal horticulture updates.

This is my recently acquired cranberry bush. I know it’s diminutive and poorly shaped, but I’m confident that a larger pot, aggressive picking, and a little fertilizer will make for a whole new bush next season.

You probably haven’t seen my pineapple in a while, well it seems that leaving it out on the balcony all summer was a really good thing. It’s doubled in size this season and really is begging for a transplant to a bigger pot. I’ve been told that unfortunately the moderate Tokyo climate isn’t warm enough for it to bear fruit, but we definitely have a second stalk coming out from the side here, so before it gets much cooler I think I’m going to gamble a split and move to a bigger pot.

Lastly, this is my first ever Japanese pumpkin, Punki. A dearth of arable land and as such pumpkins in general usually drives the price on gourds of this size upwards of thirty-five dollars, but I got a deal from a florist trying to recoup some of his fall window display investment on this healthy-looking guy for about twenty bucks. I don’t have a pumpkin knife and doubt I could find one, so this weekend at carving time I think I may take the Tim Taylor approach and go at it with my power drill. (Ha, ha, you think I’m kidding.)

Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance podcast is running in the background, and I’m already thinking about next year’s trip to Ibiza. But I have totally unprepared trip to Austria in ten days, so it’s time to go hostel hunting in Vienna.

Hirota-san says that when you’re really buried in a project, you not only lose track of time but reality as well. Riding on a crowded train, or walking through the city, you don’t pay attention to anyone. Your mind is so involved with work that nothing else even exists.

Hoka no hito ga ittemo, imi nai; kankei nai.

Even if other people are around, it means nothing. They are not related to what you’re doing and might as well not exist.

It’s not an intentional thought, or a position of haughtiness. Your reality simply collapses to the minimal set of conditions required to achieve the goal, whatever it is. (Most likely having lost all meaning in the process, you probably couldn’t explain it even if someone asked.) I think this tunnel vision is some kind of instinct, a primitive defense mechanism to conserve energy and prevent one from going insane. If you actually stopped to contemplate about how your mortal coil is all but evaporating out from beneath you, you’d probably literally get sick.

I’ve come out of one of these tunnels now… my entire summer was devoted to an already ridiculously intense project, and I have not a single summer memory aside from the one time I went to Enoshima for a few hours on the first train after pulling an all-nighter. Now, everything is nothing, and even coming close to thinking about it incurs some sort of queer cloister phobic-like panic. All of the unused tickets, the skipped concerts, the people I never called back… Now I’m twitching in withdrawal from that unhealthy work addiction, staying at the office doing almost nothing but feeling reluctant to leave. Almost unconsciously, I filled every single weekend for six straight weeks with multi-day events. Hertzberg on the 27th of September, Toyama the weekend after that, Gentenkaiki this weekend, Natural Smile the following weekend, a photo exhibition at Drop, eight days in Europe, and then Design Festa in the beginning of November. I supposedly have a birthday somewhere in there, but I won’t be near anyone who knows me for it so I don’t really think of it as happening.

Sitting now on a bench cross legged in the massive east wing of Messe and looking out into the vacant dusk sky, it’s pretty much still as Hirota-san says, hito ga ittemo, imi nai. Kankei nai.

Even if we’re together, I’m not there.

Today I’m at the Tokyo Game Show, the first I’ve attended in four years or so. Makuhari Messe is a convention center way the frick out in Chiba, past Tokyo Disneyland and near the end of the Keiyo Line. It takes at least a good forty-five minutes to get to from anywhere in the center of the city, a long, noisy train ride rolling through vast, unbroken stretches of warehouses and danchi (apartment complexes) below an eternally overcast sky. But, it’s a work day.

Seeing what the competition is doing is helpful to a degree; games are on display here a good several months to half-a-year before they are released to market. For me mostly it’s a reference to see how well other companies’ developers are taking advantage of the hardware. My job is to be sensitive to the representation of light and motion in particular. Jagged lines and rough approximations of shadows aggravate me, partly because I know it can be done better, but mostly because these are vivid reminders of the pressures of game development in general, and how many sacrifices in quality are made along the way due to project management blunders and an unskilled staff.

More or less though, it’s the same every year. Implementations of the same interaction systems pile up, most of them chaff. The truly excellent titles still stun, but these are usually the ones that show up at least three or four years in a row, a painstaking exercise in dedication and stamina. Sometimes I’m a little disheartened to think of what it takes, and how little appreciation and understanding there is for the art. But, it’s arrogant to think that most industries aren’t like that. Almost everyone has to work this hard to make an honest living, and that’s what’s really depressing.

Through the quiet countryside, far from the bullet trains and shouting storefront hawkers, I ride home through a melting rain.

Rice fields, toylike pickup trucks and elegant thatched rooves, the features foreign but the experience somewhat familiar. We pass through a grove and the sea appears, next to me. Gentle waves crash on porous rocks and somewhere, far past the blurred horizon are whispers of Russia.

Kururi trickles, drops, and plucks, a flock of small birds take off from a bushy dune. The train punches through a series of mountains and I flick through my travel playlist, searching for something fresh that suits my mood. The girl sitting next to me gets up and heads to the next car and I land on Coltemonikha, the train breaks back into daylight and waves crash just meters off to my left.

The reverb hangs around forever like a haze, the drum machines pop and synthetic cymbals crackle, rising to a rush and everything falls silent for a measure until Kate Sakai’s windy, sampled voice draws my heart back into cocoon.

I don’t know what to expect, nor do I really care at this point. Any time I can get away from Tokyo and the Yamanote line, it’s a success.

This weekend I have come to the Chubu region for the first time, running through Niigata straight to the Sea of Japan and down the coastline to Toyama. Like most of my domestic trips, I have rough goals of studying Buddhist relics and middle class life outside of the metropolis.

The buildings, trains, land all bear a faded magenta tint. I wonder if it’s particles in the air, left over from Toyama’s prewar shipbuilding industry. Everything feels like late afternoon the Midwest, and the open spaces suit my brooding mood. Last night I sat alone on the concrete steps of the fishing pier and watched the sun fall across the horizon to eventually be consumed by the sea.

I feel tired, but satisfied. My senses are dulled enough that they filter out most of what’s going on around me, but the quaint, cheery courtesy of the people I interact with pops through and fills me with a rich, complete feeling.

Smoothing out the waves…