RolandArcade: Club Sega Shinjuku Nishiguchi, Location: Shinjuku, Developer: Sega-AM2, Year: 2009, Subject: Border Break

A Game from the 90s Future

RolandArcade: Club Sega Shinjuku Nishiguchi, Location: Shinjuku, Developer: Sega-AM2, Year: 2009, Subject: Border Break
A Game from the 90s Future
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(Originally published 2018 May 22)

Border Break: play online – with school-skipping kids during the day or with family-shirking salarymen at night.

That scent of truancy – borrowed time – lends this game its forlorn nostalgia. I can feel the countless wasted nights, even though they're not my own. They feel like they happened 20 years ago.

This is the future we thought would happen while we played 16-bit Sega and Nintendo.

Photographer and writer covering Tokyo arcade life – the videogames, the metropolis and the people

RolandArcade: Club Sega Shinjuku Nishiguchi, Location: Shinjuku, Developer: Sega, Year: 2011, Subject: ToyletsComment

Now Wash Your Hands

There has long been a trend of reporting on Japan that selects and spins niche, non-news stories to contribute to a collaborative caricature of “Weird Japan”. One popular pastime is to point at sexual perversions – where many “perversions” are merely wayward of Western norms, presented absent acknowledgement or awareness of the imperfections in how we all cope with sex the world over.

RolandArcade: Club Sega Shinjuku Nishiguchi, Location: Shinjuku, Developer: Sega, Year: 2011, Subject: ToyletsComment
Now Wash Your Hands