2004jun04. Asakusa, Tokyo Japan.
The street right next to my ryokan in Asakusa had numerous stalls featuring numerous little trinkets. The schoolchildren swarms were especially thick here everyday, so you learned to take the vendor alleys to avoid the crush. This one above was from the cat souvenir shop. Some had themes, some did not.
A pachinko-riddled section of Asakusa featured a few of these standup photo-friendly cut-outs, and from the informational placards placed nearby, I am guessing that each of the characters now represented in this 2D medium was at one time a living, breathing person featured on this stretch of road. This fellow, for example, was the 666 Clown. Who needs more confirmation that clowns and devils are related? Not I.
Namco, for some reason, has a mechanical arcade game jones, which is allrighta by me. In this game, “Cool Gunman,” you and your opponent each have a light-gun and you use it to shoot flower-shaped pads on the playing field. These “pop,” and if you’ve shot one that the plastic can is resting on, the can will fly into the air. YOUR OBJECTIVE: Get the can into your neighbor’s goal.
I played it by myself and it was enjoyable. It’s a different sort of feeling. A feeling of accomplishment. “Yes, I was able to shoot the can into my opponent’s goal, even though I have no opponent.”
If my explanation was not clear, you can look at these informative graphics. There are always informative graphics in Japan. They will even appear on bars of chocolate, indicating exactly what ingredient was used to create what substrate. Information we here in America are never given.
This is a latter version of the Derby horse-racing game. There are small video cameras which provide feeds of the small, articulated horses rounding the track. AND THERE THEY GO!
The game actually “races” the horses even if no one’s put in any money, convenient for arcade-obsessed foreign amateur photographers. (see also Arcades in Japan which is this article fluffed out to five pages).