I'm in the process of migrating to zoyastreet.com. I must emphasise that it is a process, and I'm not quite finished making the new site everything I want it to be, but it has become the main place I go to post new ideas. My latest post is about advertising, and Facebook's frictionless sharing policy. It’s illustrated with beautiful Shiseido ads that, I suspect, speak not to the social self, but to those things that don't belong to our public face, the things that really drive our purchasing decisions, the things that Facebook can’t touch in its current state.
Zoya Street
Tuesday 27 September 2011
Tuesday 13 September 2011
Falling in love with Akihabara again: Retro Games
Mandarake Nakano Broadway
Early on in my stay in Japan this year, a friend of mine introduced me to the Mandarake store in Nakano broadway. It's huge, and sells many beautiful books and Pullip and Blythe dolls, and also has a handsome collection of retro games and consoles for sale. It's the place I bought my Dreamcast from, and although it was a little on the pricey side at 10,000 yen (about 80 British quid at the moment, due to the absurdly expensive yen) it's in mint condition and is a historically interesting limited edition, so I'm fairly happy. However, the retro games stores I later found in Akihabara still kicked its ass.
Super Potato, Akihabara
Super Potato is a hilariously named retro games store that exists on about four or five floors. Each floor is dedicated to another console generation, except for the top floor which is full of vintage arcade machines. It's a lovely place, and has a fairly encouraging, well-organised Dreamcast section at the back of the third floor. Unfortunately, they were missing some of the most popular Dreamcast games, including Eternal Arcadia, the one I really needed to buy as I'm writing my thesis about it. If I wanted to buy dating sims, though, I'd be in luck at Super Potato. It's also worth noting that Super Potato and Game Camp sold unboxed, body-only Dreamcasts, and had plenty in stock, while Mandarake just didn't offer that option. If I was spending more time in Japan, Akihabara would be a great source of disposable Dreamcasts - they probably don't have much life left in them, but if I wanted to I could buy a cheaper one knowing that I could replace it with another when it breaks.
Retro Game Camp, Akihabara
Retro Game Camp looks much less reassuring than either of the other two shops I visited. It's a tiny shop that appears to be fighting for its place on the main north-south road of outer Kanda, and it looks like a complete mess. While Mandarake uses its window space and the area nearest the door to showcase its most prohibitively expensive rare items, Retro Game Camp's doorway is adorned with crates of suspicious-looking, bargain basement CD-ROMS. Their website didn't indicate that they sold Dreamcast games, but since they are located so close to Don Quijote I thought it worth taking a look on my way around. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did the bargain baskets provide me with a dirt cheap, unboxed but completely legitimate, copy of Crazy Taxi, but their Dreamcast shelves were packed full of multiple copies of almost all the most popular Dreamcast games. Shenmue 1 and Eternal Arcadia were both only available at this shop when I was looking around. Retro Game Camp basically gave me exactly what I wanted in huge quantities. I left the place shaking with joy and excitement.
Thursday 1 September 2011
Falling in love with Akihabara again: Queen Dolce
I've just come home after a month-long research trip in Japan, during which I re-discovered my love of Akihabara. I loved the things you find in Akihabara long before I ever set foot in the place - in fact, by the time I actually went on my first trip to Japan, my university course had peed on my geeky parade by immersing me in more acceptable things like Edo period woodblock prints and religious history. So most of the magic of Akihabara passed me by, because the lonely teenage otaku in me was lost behind a head full of academia. But no longer! Now I'm lucky enough to be studying computer games, pursuing electronics as a hobby which artists sometimes pay me for, and occasionally writing about genderqueer fashion. All three of those things are great excuses for me to spend endless hours trawling the streets of Akiba.
I've been to your standard maid cafe before, and it was genuinely fun but didn't really feel worth the expense. I'm starting to think that it's actually a case of finding the theme cafe that suits your own taste. Aside from maid cafes there are butler cafes, cat girl cafes, old japan style cafes, and many other places where the serving staff dress up and take on a particular role. A few months before this trip I became interested in the small number of female-to-male crossdressing cafes that exist (dansou cafe). Most of them describe themselves as 'dansou gyaruson' cafes, meaning 'crossdressing garcon', although garcon itself is a pun as the first two syllables are homophonous with 'gal'. Garcon suggests french waiter-style dress, and the non-crossdressing garcon cafes are staffed by cute young men who look like pop stars. In the dansou gyaruson style, women dress up in sharp shirts and waistcoats, style their mid-length hair into spiky bird's nests and masculinise their Japanese language. And it's totally awesome.
I'll probably never be able to work out whether the theme cafe Queen Dolce constitutes a queer space. While I was there I felt as though the pretext of crossdressing staff members had created a uniquely relaxing and open atmosphere for anybody with non-normative gender identities. The clientele were mixed male and female, with more effeminate men and masculine women around than you usually see in Japan. More impressive was the was people were talking in a very relaxed tone, laughing loudly while discussing their tastes in women - I couldn't follow most of the conversation because they were using so much slang, and it was so far removed from the polite Japanese I'm used to hearing! It's not common for people to be able to open up and be themselves in public in Japan, and leaving the space of the cafe to go back to the real world was jarring. To this extent, it felt similar to Bar Wotever at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
The clear difference is that while Bar Wotever is declared to be about creating community and supporting people who exist outside of the mainstream, Queen Dolce is basically about spectacle. It so happens that the nature of the spectacle sets a tone that allows the guests to be as masculine or feminine as they wish. While the aesthetic and symbolism of Bar Wotever are set by the guests, Queen Dolce consciously makes use of specific visual effects to spark the imagination of visitors - the bar staff are dressed like pop idols or characters from romantic manga, their mannerisms and voice inflections evocative of Takarazuka theatre, the projector shows clips from old timey black and white hollywood movies with old-fashioned handsome male heroes - all together, it makes it clear that what brings the visitors to the cafe together is an admiration for a very specific form of masculinity in the female body. Whether the cafe staff like to express themselves in that way outside of working hours is a complete mystery. In short, Queen Dolce is about one specific non-normative performance of gender, while Bar Wotever is about not having to perform anymore, or performing as a way of getting closer to who you really are.
FTM crossdressing cafe
I've been to your standard maid cafe before, and it was genuinely fun but didn't really feel worth the expense. I'm starting to think that it's actually a case of finding the theme cafe that suits your own taste. Aside from maid cafes there are butler cafes, cat girl cafes, old japan style cafes, and many other places where the serving staff dress up and take on a particular role. A few months before this trip I became interested in the small number of female-to-male crossdressing cafes that exist (dansou cafe). Most of them describe themselves as 'dansou gyaruson' cafes, meaning 'crossdressing garcon', although garcon itself is a pun as the first two syllables are homophonous with 'gal'. Garcon suggests french waiter-style dress, and the non-crossdressing garcon cafes are staffed by cute young men who look like pop stars. In the dansou gyaruson style, women dress up in sharp shirts and waistcoats, style their mid-length hair into spiky bird's nests and masculinise their Japanese language. And it's totally awesome.
I'll probably never be able to work out whether the theme cafe Queen Dolce constitutes a queer space. While I was there I felt as though the pretext of crossdressing staff members had created a uniquely relaxing and open atmosphere for anybody with non-normative gender identities. The clientele were mixed male and female, with more effeminate men and masculine women around than you usually see in Japan. More impressive was the was people were talking in a very relaxed tone, laughing loudly while discussing their tastes in women - I couldn't follow most of the conversation because they were using so much slang, and it was so far removed from the polite Japanese I'm used to hearing! It's not common for people to be able to open up and be themselves in public in Japan, and leaving the space of the cafe to go back to the real world was jarring. To this extent, it felt similar to Bar Wotever at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
The clear difference is that while Bar Wotever is declared to be about creating community and supporting people who exist outside of the mainstream, Queen Dolce is basically about spectacle. It so happens that the nature of the spectacle sets a tone that allows the guests to be as masculine or feminine as they wish. While the aesthetic and symbolism of Bar Wotever are set by the guests, Queen Dolce consciously makes use of specific visual effects to spark the imagination of visitors - the bar staff are dressed like pop idols or characters from romantic manga, their mannerisms and voice inflections evocative of Takarazuka theatre, the projector shows clips from old timey black and white hollywood movies with old-fashioned handsome male heroes - all together, it makes it clear that what brings the visitors to the cafe together is an admiration for a very specific form of masculinity in the female body. Whether the cafe staff like to express themselves in that way outside of working hours is a complete mystery. In short, Queen Dolce is about one specific non-normative performance of gender, while Bar Wotever is about not having to perform anymore, or performing as a way of getting closer to who you really are.
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