Buying an Xbox in Japan: How hard can it be?
Posted on Monday, August 12, 2002 by Justin
Right. This is easy. Go to the shop. Get out cash. Buy Xbox. Go home and play.
Not quite. But let’s rewind.
Friday I get the call. Microsoft Japan wants its press Xbox back. I play dumb.
“Why?”
“Other press need it. Lots of people waiting.”
Someone else is waiting? Microsoft Japan only has a single press Xbox to loan out?
“Yes, just one.”
Either Microsoft has finally caught onto all the Xbox hate I’ve been spewing online, or we have the answer to why Japan’s press has given Xbox a collective ‘meh’.
The point being, I need a new Xbox. Luckily, I have about Y240,000 yen of points amassed at Bic camera. Friday afternoon, I wander over to the Bic in Shibuya.
By the time I reach the station, I’m already having second thoughts. Massive PlayStation2 billboards assault the platform walls. Enter the train. PlayStation2 ads EVERYWHERE. Buy Saru Getchu 2! Check out the new Zen Black PS2! No? How about the Ocean Blue one? Doesn’t matter if you already have one – get another! Get one for each room! And a copy of Suikoden III. Jesus. On a scale of 1-10, Sony’s summer advertising assault on Tokyo is 1-Orwellian. Big Brother is watching. 2+2=PS2.
I reach the Bic camera store unfettered. A Japanese Britney Spears on helium barks out prices of new PS2 games. They’re not making this easy. I go up to the games floor. Five rows of games in total. Four for Sony. One for Nintendo. None for Xbox. One of the biggest electronics shops in Tokyo, doesn’t have Xbox.
About face, and I’m about to leave, but I spy a flash of green in the corner of my eye. I head down, past one of the rows of PS2 games, past the DVDs, then past the porn DVDs, and there, I find a small pile of Xbox units stacked unceremoniously in the corner. Right along side DVD delights such as “Ugly Black Man’s Dangerous Copulation” and “Horny Nurse pie secrets” (answers on postcard).
Phew. So I’ll just get one of these. I try to lift the top unit up. Stuck. What? Pull harder, it stays put. I swear, I am not making any of this up. It literally seems glued to the next one. I ponder how many hapless, guilt-ridden Japanese gamers got this far, failed to get this top Xbox to budge, then scurried back to the safety of the PS2 shelves.
The shop assistant finally gets it loose for me. It seems that over time, the sticky price tag had become fused to the machine below. In console circles, you might as well classify this as the sheer magnetic weight of loserdom. The assistant lugs it back to the counter – it’s practically bigger than he is – poor guy. He’s being slow. Suddenly I am intensely aware of a queue forming behind me, regular gamers with copies of PS2 and GBA games clenched in their hands. I want to get home.
The clerk is still being agonisingly slow. He wraps the Xbox twice, puts it in a bag, then covers the top of the bag with a dark black plastic slip, usually reserved for men carrying bags of porn. I pay with my point card, and leave the store.
I have a 10 minute walk to the station. On the way there, I lug my Xbox through the dense Shibuya crowds. A flock of school girls walk by, they’re staring — I can practically sense their disapproval of my purchase through the anonymous black porn-plastic of my bag. Hip young street gangs eye me up, babbling on their cell phones. Ooh – they’re saying to each other – here comes one of the retards who bought one of the 2,000 Xboxes that’ll be sold nation-wide this week.
Buying my Xbox here was a strangely unsettling experience. From unfriendly retail placement, to the lack of marketing assurance, to sheer weight of PlayStation2 mindshare. Somewhere along the line, you might be forgiven for thinking ‘I'm making a bad choice.’ In a culture where group opinion rules, it's not surprising that the guy who goes through with his Xbox purchase is a pretty rare kind of Japanese gamer.
Justin
justin@tokyopia.comKlik om te vergroten...
