One of the things that shocks foreigners when they first come to Japan is how phone communication works here. Back in the day Japanese feature phones were light-years ahead of their overseas rivals. Rather than rely on simple text messages, phones sent messages via email.

It caught new arrivals to the country unawares but really was a better system. It allowed for larger messages and for the user to add colour and decoration, which led to a standard set of emoticons which all Japanese phones share to this day. You could also send messages to someone’s phone from any computer, which is good for sending messages for free. This however caused the system’s biggest downfall. It was really easy to spam a phone’s email from a pc. I had to disable emails from computers on my phone because of the constant spam I was getting and I am generally very careful about who I let know my email address.

Fast forward a few years and the entire phone landscape has changed, Japanese phones are no longer number one and pretty much everything uses iOS or Android. Now that smart phones have taken over instant messaging is all the rage. What instant messenger is everyone using? It’s not Facebook Messenger, it’s not Skype and it certainly isn’t any platform specific app. No, everyone here uses LINE.

Never heard of it? I’m not surprised but in about a year users have risen to 20 million in Japan alone. Which is seriously impressive considering that only 10 - 20 million use the likes of Facebook and Twitter here. Hell, Mixi, the leader in the Japanese social network sphere only has 30 million active users and that has been around for ages.

Made by the Japanese wing of Naver, a Korean company it seems to have appealed to the Japanese sensibility by adding something that the likes of Skype and Facebook haven’t, cuteness.

Not only does it use all the common emoticons but it has come up with cute little pictures (which it calls stickers) to insert into the chats. A fair few are available for free but a couple of months back Naver introduced the sticker shop so people with cash to burn can drop a few yen on new sets of cute characters doing lovable things.

The introduction of this kind of thing shows that Naver intends to exploit the hell out of LINE. Capitalising on the intense popularity of the chat program they have introduced an Instagram style camera app. The twist here is that you can put the little Line stickers all over the photos too. They have even made a greeting card app using the popular stickers.  Any picture made in these apps can sent via Line or any other social network for that matter.

Naver have even added a Tetris style puzzle game called LINE Birzzle to the Line brand, any link to the original chat app is spurious at best but if you download it you get free new stickers to use in chats.

It’s looking like Naver want to take over the world. 25 million of its users are based outside Japan, the company expect 100 million users by the end of the year and they have said they want to build a social network to rival Facebook. For now everything they have made is available for free (with micro transactions for extras) which makes them one of the good guys. So, if you want a VoIP chat/instant messaging program with a Japanese feel give it a go, be an early adopter of the Line international revolution.

Today’s mobile obsessed society has created a few rather odd changes in people. Like me, maybe you have been affected by Phantom Vibration Syndrome, you feel like your phone is vibrating in your pocket when it is not actually doing so.

With all the information exchanged with smartphones these days I have noticed that people are just looking at the likes of Facebook and Twitter rather than talking to the friends around them. I have been guilty of things as well, so I can’t really complain too much when someone does it to me. However I once noticed a couple in a bar just staring at their iPhones and not talk to each other or even make eye contact all night.

Last week a friend of mine did cross the line though. The two of us went to a bar, as we sat down he reached for his phone. “Ah, he is going to check his messages”,  I thought. But no, he launched a game. Feeling pretty put out by this, I quizzed him and without looking at the screen, while aimlessly brushing his finger across it, he told me that what he was doing would only take a second. With that, he pressed the home button and put the phone down.

It shocked me that he had started this game in the first place but I was even more shocked by the fact that all he did with it was randomly stab at the screen and then put the phone down again. I told him that it seemed like a pretty shite game if that’s all you do. “It very addictive,” he instantly countered, “Don’t knock it until you try it”.

So I tried it.

And it is indeed shite.

All you do in the game is put some plant food on a log and wait, eventually (after a couple of hours) some mushrooms grow and you swipe the screen to pick them up. You can mix various things together to make special mushrooms grow. If you don’t pick up the mushrooms in time they wither and give you no points. Pick up mushrooms to gain points, use points to buy more stuff to grow mushrooms.

Forgive me in asking this but what is the point? At my most generous I can say it is a bit like those item combining mini-games you sometimes get in Role Playing Games like Dragon Quest. Something which I have always found tedious and usually don’t bother with. Perhaps it’s a bit more like the Zen Garden in Plants Vs. Zombies, where you grow seeds to make plants sprout, which eventually gives you more money. The difference is though these are just extra ways to get added bonuses and have more fun in the actual game, not the whole point of the game itself. Is it a game or some kind of lame collection’em up?  You can replicate the gameplay simply by unlocking your iPhone’s screen.

A Zen Garden

The only positive thing I can say about the game is that it is free. At least getting new mushrooms is based on patience and not just micro-transactions to buy the best stuff. One of the reasons I dislike Angry Birds is not just that it is a pretty meh game but also because of all the micro-transations it insists on. Call me Mr Traditional but I believe that if you spend money on a game you shouldn’t have to pay more to skip a level. Paying more to play less, it’s madness.

Anyway, maybe my friend is right and I am wrong, this app is currently the most popular smart phone game app in Japan and has launched a brand new Hello Kitty style character into the nation’s conscience.

A penis with a face.

I jest of course, this is supposed to be a nameko mushroom and while I can’t deny its resemblance to that foodstuff, there is something disturbingly phallic about the whole thing. No wonder the character is amazingly popular with girls.

Despite this character’s recent popularity, he (it can only be a he) is not an entirely new creation. Quite a few years ago a point and click game called Touch Detective was released on the Nintendo DS. I have always loved point and click games so I was very happy with the mini revival that this genre was receiving on Nintendo’s all-conquering duel screened machine. I was very tempted to buy Touch Detective but the perturbing character designs made me feel uneasy. Not only did the main character have giant, never closing, saucer eyes but by her side was a cock with arms, legs and a face.

Put me right off.

I knew that if I bought that game and looked at that member any longer the damn thing would haunt my dreams. Luckily after one sequel the Touch Detective games died and were forgotten about.

Unfortunately for me, some businessman somewhere decided to resurrect that character with the intent to market the hell out of it. Within seconds of that mobile game coming out, plushies, key rings, stickers were rolled out and the public, being the obedient little puppies they are, swallowed it all. Hell, there was even a song written about them. Say what you want about the likes of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma, they are at least cute and cuddly. These “Funghi” are just grim.

Not only is the character itself disturbing but the situation stinks of the biggest corporate marketing shenanigans since Muppets Take Manhattan unleashed Muppet Babies on the world.

I’m sure that many odd things have been seen through the windows of trains. Houses usually pass by so fast but often odd things can be seen from the corner of the your eye and your imagination fills in the rest. One such thing happened to me and caused me to doubt my sanity back when I first came to Japan.

On the ever crowded Odakyu Line, between Tsurukawa and Tamagawagakuen-mae, though the throng of people, I spied a strange house that looked like it was straight out of the film Laputa: Castle in the Sky. In that movie, the titular flying castle had a very interesting look. It was all overgrown and organic looking buildings. Not the kind of thing you expect to see in your usual Japanese town.

It took me about 2 years to believe it was actually there, any local I asked about it refused to admit the thing’s existance. As though it was some sort of conspiracy. Not only did it look like something out of a film but also like some sort of future house. You know, the houses they used to talk about on Tomorrow’s World. The ones that either had too many windows or none at all, or maybe they looked like a tree or some sort of cave.

The one you can spy from the train tracks is more the later. It looks like some big concreate dome with some sort of weird crow’s nest at the top. The design is all curvy and windowless, with little port holes at the bottom.

There is a university close by, so I assumed it was some sort of mad lecturer’s experiment. The other day, however, I finally walked up and took a closer look at it and found that this may not be the case. It appears to be inhabited like any other regular house.

So I have to ask you…. Why is it there? What does it do? Are people actually living there? Why are their barely any windows? What is going on?

Please internet, help me solve this mystery.

If you have been a regular reader of this website you may have noticed by now that I am a huge fan of Shiina Ringo and I like to read manga. Imagine my joy then, when browsing the selves of my local RECOfan used music shop, I found a manga about the life of the lady herself.

Ringo Through the Looking Glass (Kagami no Kuni no Ringo) was a manga released in 2001 and written by a bloke named Soushi Sakurai. It appears to be part of a set of manga that was written about famous Japanese bands of the time. Ads for comics about the likes of L’Arc En Ciel, Glay and the wonderfully named KinKi Kids litter the book.

The comic itself is a biopic (biocom?) about her life before becoming famous, largely focusing her school years but runs all the way up to the release of her first album.

To its credit the book seems like it is quite well researched and covers all the key aspects of Ringo’s life. Things like being unable to do ballet because of the operations she had as a child, the talent shows she entered, the conflict she had with producers over lyrics and her study in England are all mentioned. I guess the comic deserves full marks for that.

Where the thing falls down though is with Sakurai’s art. It ranges from competent to ruddy awful and back again. He has drawn Ringo with a crazy moon face and the expressions she pulls are really ugly. The other characters in the book don’t look too bad so I guess his style doesn’t lend itself well to real people.

Worse still is that sometimes the body proportions are all over the place, with Ringo suddenly possessing huge man hands every so often. You can tell this comic was drawn for money and not for love by the huge inconstancies in the art. This is really exemplified by the end of the book where the artist has drawn his own renditions of CD covers and famous photos of Ringo. Some are actually pretty well drawn others are grotesque.

Just look at these examples:

Ok

 Ok

OMG THE HORROR!!!!!!

Would I recommend this book? Nah.

The art is mostly horrible and it is not available in English. I had to struggle through it in Japanese, which meant I had to look at some of those shoddily drawn panels much longer than the artist probably intended. If you really want to find out about Shiina Ringo’s life I recommend you just read her wiki page. It’s all in there, spookily so, it’s almost as though they used this book to research the entry.