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Examining Tokyo's Media Immersion Pods
the terminal of geoff goodfellow writes "The New York Times has an article on the Bagus Gran Cyber Café in Tokyo, where customers rent so-called media immersion pods. From the article: 'At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts outfitted with VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television on a Toshiba set, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyperspeedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels.'"
What a fancy and pretentious name for a manga cafe.
These are all over the place, nothing special, and a good cheap way to spend the night if you missed the last train or don't have a hotel. You get your own cubicle with internet access or a console, you can read manga or watch a movie or surf the net, whatever. Plus free refills for soft drinks.
It's nice but I don't see what the big deal is.
In the US, we have living rooms and dens where all our media needs are meet. Have you been in a typical Japanese house?
This is why private karaoke rooms are such a hit there. If you want to get eight people together, doing so at somebody's house is out of the question.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Also, these internet and manga cafés are usually open around the clock, and have lately begun to offer amenities like showers, so quite a few people use them as a cheap place to crash if they've been partying and missed the last train home.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Hotels renting rooms over night or by the hour, often with some kind of theme setting. It's not for prostitution, as many westerners assume at first, but a popular way for people to get together, especially since the expensive rents mean you often live at home until you marry.
My favourite around here in Osaka is "Chapel Christmas", which, as you may guess, is Christmas-themed, complete with a huge Santa and grinning happy elves all over the facade. I have a few pictures here:
Chapel Christmas
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The typical setup I saw gives you hiragana by default (one of two phonetic syllableries) and lets you convert them to the traditional (pre-simplified) Chinese characters adopted many years ago by the Japanese. There are a few keys which allow you to modify the input method to input "romaji" as well as the various Japanese writing systems.
Actually, the Kanji are Chinese characters (called Hanzi, roughly "people's writing" in China IIRC) which were adopted in Japan long before Katakana and Hiragana were created. The kana systems borrowed heavily from radicals in Chinese characters for many of their shapes. Slightly more accurately, hiragana borrowed heavily from Chinese characters to make a simpler writing system primarily for poetry, and then katakana borrowed heavily from hiragana when Japanese noblemen didn't want to use a writing system developed by women. Go figure...
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As a Japanologist I can say you're completely wrong about some points.
1) Hanzi simply means Han Characters, (referring to the Han Dynasty, not the Han Chinese)
2) Hiragana was derived from cursively written man'yogana (Characters used for phonetic value, not meaning). This was used by women in the beginning, hence it was also known as Onnade ("woman's hand"). These weren't the only kana in use however, they were simply standardized by the goverment from the large pool of "hentaigana".
3) Katakana are taken from graphemes (small building blocks) from characters. These are NOT cursive. These were originally developped by monks (early Heian) to hint at the pronunciation of characters.
4) Japanese characters are not the same as the traditional Chinese characters. I also study Literary Chinese which uses traditional characters, and there are quite a few differences between characters. There are differences in stroke order, stroke count, radicals, etc... A simple example is the character for "study" (xue2, gaku, mana, bu). The Japanese use the simplified variant of it, not the traditional one.
Look, I couldn't afford the rental rates for the computer, so I just wanted a quick wank at the "Bosomy Babes of Bulgaria" web site you were hunched over. It wouldn't have killed you to lean back a bit, and you wouldn't have gotten anything in your eye.
By the way, in Japan the private rooms also provide a box of tissues. In case you get a cold, I believe.
A Japanese house (yes probably through necessity) is, in comparison, polite quiet and tidy. And the home made food infinitely more apatising. So the pods being a refuge idea is a US construct I think.
I live in Japan, and it's not altogether "a US construct". Consider: you're 20-something, and you're of course living at home, since the rent on even a small apartment is absolutely ruinous for a single person. You do have a job, though, and since - if you're a very consentious child - you're sharing the living expenses with your parents, you have a quite comfortable level of disposeable income even with a pretty low entry-level position (and if your parents are indulgent, you aren't paying anything at all, making that income all the more significant). The same goes for your current SO.
In fact, if you save for a few years, together you could in fact afford that apartment in a Tokyo suburb or somewhere in southern Osaka. But until your relationship becomes long-term and serious enough, there's of course no way you're goi9ng to risk something like that. So for the time being you're relegated to whatever resources you have. And seriously, with money burning in your pocket, are you going to spend an hour on the local train to go to your or your SO:s parent's house, endure socializing, knowing winks (not to mention the ever-present risk of baby pictures) to retire to a small bedroom all of a couple of meters away from the living room where the old folk are laughing at the latest lame Osaka burlesque on the TV?
Or are you going to a dinner out on the town, followed by a short walk to a clean, fresh hotel in any kind of style you wish (with no shortage of "special" styles whenever you want to spice things up a bit (there famously is a Hello Kitty Dungeon in one hotel here in Osaka)), with no interruptions, thin walls, kid brothers or parents, and with attentive, affordable room service at the touch of a button?
I absolutely, totally, unconditionally agree on the state of Japanese living - it really is neater, cleaner and more friendly than anywhere I've been. But for those times you want to be alone together, it's really not optimal.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.