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63824peace · 4 years

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Tuesday, 29th of november 2005

When I left home this morning, I saw that someone had repainted the pavement's white lane markings. The newly lettered STOPs covered the old and faded characters like freshly fallen snow.

The icy new lines sat slightly off-center the old ones, and the two STOPs blended into double-vision. I felt as though I had astigmatism when I looked at them. The painters hadn't traced the old edge-lines very well either. I could see traces of the old and over-trodden markings beneath the newly painted lines.

They should do better work when they try to renovate the area. Even so, the repainted lane markings made me feel as though the roads had renewed their vigor.

I walked to the train station and thought about roads. Roads and the ground that they pattern form much of our perception of a town. We need them to comprehend something as simple as a row of houses along a street.

An unpleasantly warm wind slipped across my face.

I noticed the blurred STOP letters on the ground and then I noticed other lines and figures that I usually ignore. Though it sounds odd, the lettered STOPs made it impossible to stop seeing new things!

I observed the pavement while I walked, and the act felt natural. I had paid enough attention to notice two species of STOPs on the road: one written in kanji, and the other written in hiragana. Had someone placed the hiragana STOPs for younger school children who might rush into traffic? And, if that's so, had someone placed the kanji STOPs in traffic lanes for kanji-literate drivers?

No... I decided against my explanation. I saw hiragana STOPs for drivers too. What standard does the city use to determine where hiragana and kanji STOPs go?

I continued walking with my head bent toward the ground. I saw so many painted figures such as squares, plusses, and perpendicular Ts. I noticed numbers and letters on speed limit signs... I saw Emergency Parking signs in front of the hospital. I even noticed the commonplace median markings, stop lines, and crosswalks.

I gave the pavement's surface more and more attention. I saw grounded dashes, marks, numbers, and letters fill the pavement. All countries paint this kind of national graffiti on their roads.

I hadn't realized so before, but different types of roads serve as navigation media that carry a lot of information. The asphalt symbols define a sort of program to describe the way everything should move... people, bicycles, motorbikes, and cars.

I didn't see a single naked road during my walk to the station. Well… I didn't see anything in the alley where I take my shortcut. No cars travel there.

We'll see our roads painted with more and more symbols in the future. We'll walk around looking at the numbers and road signs on the ground.

We should look at the ground more often while walking. Our postures will worsen, but perhaps we'll discover something from our new perspective. Our tears will drop straight down our faces though, so we'll need to take care when we cry.

I ate an Agedori Lunch at the restaurant Hana Goyomi. Gucci ordered Ishiyaki Kaisen.

I met with Mr. Muraoka at the bookstore. He recommended that I pick up The Day Yukio Mishima Died (Vol. 2). I got Joseph Finder's new novel, Paranoia, instead.

People are holding many festivals in honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Yukio Mishima's death. The movie Spring Snow has become a big hit recently too; Mishima wrote the film's source material. Maybe I'll read Mishima's books again after I've taken a long break from them.

My father ardently admired Mishima's writing. I remember his shock when he learned that Mishima had committed harakiri.

I stopped by Shin-chan's work booth after I had returned to KojiPro. I found him with a Mishima biography.

Shin-chan, Murashu, Rettsu, and I received our flight suits for OOOO Training from Phantom. Murashu tried his on first. He posed flamboyantly when I took out my camera.

We had arranged to get identical flight suits. We bought them used from a military base. We don't need brand-new materials this time because we plan to incorporate them into our self-made camouflage outfits.

Each suit's color differs from the others', but they all were once identically green. The colors of the Nomex fibers blush when over-exposed to the sun. The tincture of the new colors depends upon the circumstances and length of exposure to ultraviolet rays.

Each suit outwardly bears the record of its military career.

Microsoft has recently released the Xbox 360 in the United States. I played a bit of Project Gotham Racing 3 and drove a white Lotus Esprit through London. I felt like Roger Moore as 007.

I parked the car on the side of the road and then manipulated the camera to view the onlookers behind the wire frame. The people aren't in 2D - they're in 3D! It's a next-generation system, so that's really expected.

I played the U.S. version, and I found that the options include Japanese and even Korean subtitles. Incredible... does this mean that the system is region-free? If that's true, then I can play foreign games too. I definitely want to play King Kong, but I should watch the movie before I play the game.

I gave an interview in the early evening with Mr. Hamamura for Famitsu's December 22 issue. Mr. Hamamura's interviews always turn into pleasant conversations.

Enjoyable interviews don't happen very often. No matter how many interviews I give, I always feel apprehensive. I especially become more cautious whenever I interview with newspapers or general interest magazines. Some of the nastier interviewers schedule an appointment just to bring up their ideas about the immorality of video games. Other wily interviewers try to talk me into a corner. I actually get a stomachache after enough of those.

Mr. Hamamura is totally different. We have both worked in the industry for a long time, and he has a lot of experience in games. Mr. Hamamura loves games, and he shares my concern for the future of the gaming industry.

I actually started to enjoy today's conversation so much that I forgot it was work! I dropped my guard and I accidentally mentioned our new PSP project.

I'll apologize to Okamura before they publish that issue of Famitsu.

I went shopping in Ginza later in the evening. I hadn't been there in a while. Ginza's department store closes early at night, so I only had an hour. I had to shop so quickly that I didn't have a lot of time to deliberate.

I automatically rush out of a department store whenever they play Auld Lang Syne. They only use the chime to announce that they will close soon. They don't mean to throw me out, but I rush out anyway. I wasn't able to buy a lot, but at least I had the chance to shop.

I saw a huge Christmas tree in front of the Chanel boutique. It would light up only in fixed intervals, probably to save energy. All the nearby girls started to photograph the tree with their cell phones when it lit up. They treated the occasion like a red carpet affair for a film star.

I pulled out my camera, too, for HIDEOBLOG. I was the only man there-but at least I had the best camera.

I wonder... who will they show their pictures to? Will the girls send them to their peers or boyfriends by cell phone email? I don't think that many women take photographs to preserve their subjects' beauty. I think they take them to show other people.

Of course, I took my photograph to include in HIDEOBLOG. Widespread cell phone usage has really changed the purpose for photography.

I passed in front of the lottery ticket seller with the reputation for selling the most winning tickets. Unfortunately they had already closed for the day.

I was surprised to see guards standing around the front of the booth. I suppose they had received a lot of daytime business.

It was the legendary booth where they sell the most winning tickets in Japan. The booth's front sign proclaimed in large letters: "Our billionaires were born here! Three hundred people have won 42.1 billion yen during the whole Heisei Era! Fourteen people won 2.6 billion yen in Heisei-16 alone!"

The booth gave me a strangely strong feeling that I could win. I would have bought some tickets had the booth stayed open. I stepped closer and noticed that its windows had been assigned numbers from 1 through 7, with the exceptions of 4 and 6.

I can understand why they omitted 4 - it’s an unlucky number. I wonder why they left out 6 though. What's wrong with 6?

I mused quietly to myself about these things, and Kenichiro called the Chance Center to ask about it.

They had seven numbered windows in the beginning. "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" had mentioned on November 28 that people would wait in line at Window-1 for three and a half hours. The window gained a reputation for selling many winning tickets. News of Window-1's fortune spread, and its business increased.

After a while, Window-1 couldn't handle its number of clients. They wanted to create a second Window-1 to resolve this. They would renumber the windows 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 – but then 7 would have disappeared. They couldn't just do away with lucky number seven. They decided to discard the number 6, so that's why the booth appears as it does today.

Even lottery shops outwardly wear their histories.

I would have bought lottery tickets from Window-3. I haven't aggrandized the number 3 like the hero did in Stealth. It's just an attractive looking number, and I've always liked it because of that. Number three is also another lucky number.

At the HMV in Ginza, I listened to the album With Love & Squalor by the band We Are Scientists. I decided to go ahead and buy it. It's the New York based trio's first album.

Their style sounds a lot like British rock, and their sound coheres with the in-vogue Post-New-Wave movement. The Bravery and The Rapture came from New York too. Perhaps British rock fans should pay attention to New York.

I ate a late dinner at Toridori in Ginza San-cho-me. "San" means three, so there's another number three! It took me a little while to realize that I had been there before.

I settled for a couple of glasses of draft beer since I wasn't in top physical shape today.

I left Ginza on the Hibiya subway line. It was already late, so I just descended at the transfer station and passed Roppongi Station. I didn't go back to the office.

I only bought a ticket for the trip between Ginza and Roppongi since I already have a commuter pass. I wouldn't have been able to pass through the automatic ticket gate outside the transfer station without that ticket. The alarm would have activated if I had only inserted my Roppongi pass. They use these measures to prevent people from cheating on their fares.

I have always taken the gate with an actual stationed employee to solve that problem. I could simply show him both my commuter pass and my ticket. I went to the last gate on the row and presented both to the employee.

"Oh, right," he said casually. "Put both of them into the automatic gate's slots, please. Then you can pass with no problem!"

"Really? I haven't heard of this before."

I half doubted what he said, but I inserted both into the machine as he had advised. It's the same method used when boarding the Shinkansen bullet train. They require us to insert both the regular ticket and the special express pass at the same time.

The gate opened just like he said it would.

"Wow!"

That was convenient. How long have they used this? Was I the only one who didn't know about it? Or had they recently revamped the automated gates?

I later considered it rationally, and I realized that it shouldn't be too difficult. From both technological and financial perspectives, machines ought have the ability to accept a ticket and a pass pretty easily, one laid atop the other. What have they been doing all this time?

It's such a trivial matter, but I can't stop thinking about it.

I suddenly remembered when I first passed through an automatic ticket gate. I had boarded the Hankyu Line in the Kansai region. That was over thirty years ago.

Not many people know this, but Kansai used automatic ticket gates long before Tokyo. They installed the mechanized gates one day without any warning. I was a boy in elementary school, and I felt as though the door to the future had opened.

"Now, wait just a second...."

Thirty years have passed. The ticket-reading technology and its speed have surely improved since then. It can now recognize the doubled-up SUICA Pass.

But can we really call that progress? We've only modified our machines to read two passes at once after thirty years. Nothing about the ticket gates has really changed, unless we count the advertisements stuck on them. Other technologies advance quickly, but ticket gate technology has moved as slowly as a turtle. Even the game consoles have advanced rapidly within only ten years.

What will the next-generation ticket gate look like? The idea seems kind of strange.

I'm sure that the very concept of ticket gates will disappear in the future. We'll soon enter into the age of digitized personal identification. We won't need to carry anything with us. We'll shop with digitized personal IDs, and we'll even use them to pay for transportation and food. The fees will automatically withdraw. A time will come when personal IDs will handle all of our living needs-food, clothing, and even shelter.

It will be convenient, but I still can't shake the suffocation that comes when I think about it. We may even see a society so controlled that we'll need personal IDs just to breathe fresh air. We will exchange that freedom for 21st century security.

I wrote HIDEOBLOG after midnight with the television running in the background. I saw Mr. Tokoro's commercial several times: "The End-of-the-Year Jumbo Lottery: Three Hundred Million Yen!"

The absent Window-6 haunts me.

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