Osu to Mesu

Honda-san and I are taking the JR train to Akihabara. Like any sentient being in Japan I need a TV. Bad. I want cute and weird NHK puppets to teach me Japper-knees. I need to see Kaoru Yumi kill wicked-looking men with chomage hairstyles while dressed as a ninja, walking towards the camera grinning before the credits clad in a kimono-slash-secret-identity. I need this kind of shit every minute every day. Otherwise, I would have settled for El Cucuy and the La Raza show back in SF.

Honda-san is telling me about the manga-only prequel to Astro Boy, Tetsuwan Atom, the one I’ve never heard about before. Forgive me Fred S. and Fred P. if you guys were feeding Tezuka the Fritos when he came up with it.

Atom travels back in time, in search of his “father,” Professor Ochanomizu. He makes the journey  just fine, and manages to contact his maker, but he finds he can’t go back to the future. To move past the point of his own creation is impossible. He is stuck in time.

Honda-san produces a piece of paper and draws three dots, and then a line straight through them. The first dot is where Atom came from, the second, at the other end is where he went to. The one in the middle is a fixed point that Atom cannot pass, because two atomic-powered Pinocchio’s cannot be in the same place at the same time. So Atom commits jisatsu. Hara-kiri. Whatever you want to call it. He kills himself. The very last Astro Boy story turns out to be the first one, his death is his birth, and the word “bittersweet” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Suddenly, the Chuo Rapid begins to exceed its best-ever time on the rails. By Yotsuya, the scenery is speeding by so fast it looks like we are on Space Mountain. But no one shows any alarm. The ojisan, obasan, and aka-chan alike are used to Tokyo's peculiarities regarding time and passage along it's corridor. This town changes direction every 5 minuets, even as the train tracks stay the same. Regardless of wherever Honda-san and I will wind up, the rest of the passengers will reach their own destinations in time.

When we get to Akihabara, the train conductor announces it is the year 200X, well after the Kaiju Dai Senso, the Great Monster War, but just enough time before an angry Neo-Seatopia emerges in the Okinawan Islands so as not to worry.

The huge NTT IT complex, a collection of cold steel and glass tower with a total floor space of 160,000 m² located on an 11,500 m2 site in front of Akihabra station, the one that The Reporter from the Washington Post utterly failed to mention in his recent piece that ripped off me and Tomo, has finally finished construction. And, in fact, we have arrived on the occasion of its opening day.

The textbook otaku and shifty-eyed salarymen mill about as usual, paying the whole scam no mind. They lug about backpacks or briefcases of Real Doll porn (pictures of flesh and blood women making love to silicone counterparts in the front, with ads for rubber vaginas in the back), sweating in the hurricane humidity until they smell like death, swimming upstream to the New Release section of Gal Game emporium Furukawa Denki. I note computer chips for keychains and beautifully designed Kojiro Abe shirts from Bon-Kura. I shake my head, and can’t resist a giggle. He’s seriously like the new Charles Manson to these guys now.

The mayor of Tokyo himself, Shintaro Ishihara arrives via armored police escort. The Spinners are in ground-mode, and are modeled after the old cars from Seibu Keisatsu, which starred Shintaro’s dear old brother Yujiro. He does the usual thing, making proclamations of this and that, how Tokyo will be remade and rejuvenated for the 2Xst century thanks to the gold from the defeated Planet X which Walt Disney also used to help fund Miyazakiland. Meanwhile, the kigurumi mascots of NTT Urban Development and Kajima Corporation  (a pair of kawaii Zeros and Ones with familiar looking big white four fingered gloves) hand Ishihara the Box with the Button. One press, and this thing they call “Akihabara UDX” will be open for business. Honda yawns. He’s been doing this all day, but says he’s not bored or tired. But he confesses only writes anime scripts, and isn’t an otaku himself (Carl, can you find evidence of anyone, other than yourself, actually admitting to it? It seems to be the sort of title that's only bestowed on you by others.). I merely wish I’d brought my camera. Doubly so after what happens next.

Ishihara’s features begin to change. His eyes take on a sickly yellow pallor. His spine begins to fold in on itself. The puppet reporters from NHK are stunned and rush in for a Dai Scoop. And then Ishihara begins to laugh. The sound wave it produces induces vomiting all the way to Mister Donut. Even That Reporter From the Washington Post begins to taste sour chunks of Jiffy Pop in the back of his throat.

An angry green line of energy rockets forth from the top of the NTT building. It strikes the Radio Center Building dead center. All the way though the ero-dojin of K Books and smack into the Kaiyodo showroom. The point of contact is an exquisite anatomically perfect statue of an Orangutan that’s not for sale, even though some guy who had Orangutan Younger Sister Moe tried to buy it once. The building goes down like Godzilla Final Wars at the box office.

A million otaku cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.

The beam, which now zaps straight up into the sky overhead like an erect Overfiend also has a carrier signal, designed, I surmise, by ex-agents of ESPY, which activates secret command Roku-Roku. The collected Cosplay girls of Akihabara begin to leave their posts as waitresses and spoon-feeders at their numerous cafes and begin to robotically march into Chuo Street.

The otaku who emerge from the dojin store are stunned, gasp, and reach for their keitai. From the eyes of the maids come deadly energy beams. The air smells like ozone and that bad pork they put in 500 yen ramen. The otaku, the ones who reclaimed Akihabara from the electronic stores who abandoned them for the suburbs, are systematically being disintegrated. The fuckers don’t even put up a fight. They should have read more Golgo 13, more Kajiwara Ikki.

There’s nothing more to do, except buy that damn television at the LaOX chain store. The set is small and cheap but turns out to get shitty reception.  If I got that copy of My Doll Friend back in the Radio Kaikan, I would have been killed too. But all I had in my bag at the time of betrayal was the Tokyo City Atlas (now, sadly, outdated) and a copy of Kenka Bancho for the PS2, still-shrink wrapped.

The New Way still permits some games to remain in what is now called Akihabara-X, although it’s mostly Kingdom Hearts and it’s lame-but-popular sequels nowadays. I take some solace that the antique transistor shops, the discarded hard drive vendors, and LED light makers - who first invented Akihabara as a post war black market, are still allowed to keep their dusty pens. These old wizards and Akihabarbarians of electricity and frequency are still feared and respected, even by the emerging IT empire.

The Cosplay girls will be marching into the NTT plaza soon, to renounce their vows, to trade in their maid costumes and cat ears for wireless headsets and elevator operator uniforms. No one will ever make toys of them, and it’s said that you will be cursed for a thousand years if you cum while thinking of them.

As I write this, back in bunker Draft One, my geto Tu-Ka pre-paid cell phone buzzes. It’s Happy Ujihashi over in Shinjuku. He's standing in front of the new Showakan. But there is a distant rumbling in the background and I can't hear him so well.

“Do you hear that?” Honda says, calm as ever, while Bu-chan the cat - face like someone spilled an inkwell on it - leaps to the top of the TV. “Do you know what that is?”

I shake my head and say “ie,” no, with the baka gaijin accent.

“Those are Bosozoku.”

He may have well have said Boso-Nazgul, the way the atmosphere has changed.

I imagine them making a line for the nearby Ghibli Museum, the Yankee Mamas shouting “bari bari!” over the boys with their mighty cries of “yoroshiku!” But they could be headed for the warring Shotengai city-states near Kichijoji station. Either way, I wonder who has sent them.

Then I I know who it is. Who else could have been behind this? It could only be Gyaku-ESPY.

Counter-ESPY.

Comments

[Joseph Luster]

I really need to wear my Abe shirt more often. The characters underneath the image? Oh, they read "Dasai Gaijin."

[Gilles Poitras]

Patrick, I take it that you're over the jet lag.

[Carl Horn]

"But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods...All that openeth the matrix is mine."

Can you prove it didn't happen?

I'm always surprised by people who really do have much larger collections than me and their own forums and shit yet have a problem with the word otaku. It seems to always be the other fellow who is. Not that it's my job to put names on others. That was Adam's job. The one in Genesis. No, Genesis in the Pentateuch, not Genesis 0:0—In The Beginning, which comes as a bonus with the Eva Platinum Box Set, but which I have had on commercial VHS since 1995, in the summer of the year. Where's Mamoru Oshii when I need him? He's the only one that I can talk to, except that I can't get him to say anything.

Oshii's BLOOD novel has been translated now. A lot of stuff about the Rothschilds made me quiver. Just when you think you're about to get to the revelation of the International Zionist Vampire conspiracy, the missile veers ninety degrees left and pins the villain on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, and the previous job on the resume of the new Pope Benedict XVI. I believe his last major ruling was something about why transsexuals can't be Catholics. Anyway, I was relieved that Oshii was attacking the Vatican, as I believe this to be more nihonshugi, zur nationalen Neuorganisation Japans, zur Gründung rechtsextremer krimineller Organisationen, yakuza-Rechte.

I have a reproduction of Casal's Martyrdom of Lorenzo Ruiz, a man of Manila who died not a pimp but a saint, martyred in Nagasaki with a Dominican named Vincenzo della Croce Shiotsuka. Colorful tortures of the Edo period are seen. Four centuries later this painting becomes Malevich, white on white, and black circle, as a hole in the clouds opens suddenly, giving Bock's Car twenty seconds to shed its load instead of ditching Fat Man in the sea. In a world next door the coup against the Emperor succeeds, there is no surrender, and on August 17 the third bomb, Green Apple, is dropped, as per the suggestion of Strategic Air Force commander Carl Spaatz, detonating 1800 feet over Nihonbashi, home of the original hostess. And a close examination of Patrick's 6/11/05 post shows small differences; the governor in this world was named Akio Sugino. But Tokyo itself was rebuilt--that's Tokyo's trick, after all.

Beggar's Banquet was may dad's favorite Stones (as his generation said) album, and oddly my current favorite track is "Prodigal Son."

[arron]

hi