Topic: Gaming life in Japan

Anyone here grew up in Japan? I’m curious as to the gaming life there and how it’s different from the West. More specifically during the Famicom and Super Famicom era. I know Japanese schools give a lot more homework and exams are more difficult. For workers, long work hours are common. How do students and workers find time for gaming? Do kids go to each other’s home after school or on weekends to play the Famicom like kids did with the NES and Super NES in the West? Are Japanese parents in general more strict with limiting gaming time for their kids than Western parents? Since Japanese homes are in general much smaller than US homes, do they pose a challenge for gamers who collect games or do Japanese gamers don’t collect games as much due to limited storage space? I’m curious to know the cultural differences in gaming habits between Japanese and Western gamers.

I didn't grow up here in Japan, but I live here now and have talked with my co-workers about this. They did grow up here at that time. One co-worker was really fond of the Famicom and said he often used the disc system. There really were those machines at convenience stores where you could bring a disc in and put a new game on it.

I have no numbers on it, but there definitely ARE thriving communities of game collectors here. There is nothing quite like the retro game stores in Akihabara in Tokyo or Nipponbashi in Osaka. I have been in a couple that were 3 big floors of stuff. Those stores wouldn't exist if they didn't generate the business needed to support them. If you can afford a 3 floor building in Japan for your business, you are doing very well.

Another cultural difference is because of Japan's wonderful public transit systems. Portable gaming is extremely popular here, Game Boys, Wonderswan, and more recently 3DS and Vita were all very successful. Today many of my students spend a lot of time playing games on their phones as well(much to my dismay as I consider phone games to be trash). I most often see the Switch reserved for longer travel stretches like on a shinkansen(bullet train)

You cannot really say "Japanese parents in general". That is far too broad. While there isn't the diversity you see in the US, people still have a lot of variety in them, same for parenting. Some are very strict, some are far too loose and everything in between.

Unfortunately a lot of Japanese adults do work sometimes ridiculous hours which heavily limits their time to do anything other than work, commute and sleep. Throw a marriage in there too and game time becomes just on the train to work. One of my coworkers explained to me that a "good adult mindset" is basically your life is your job. Which makes me a bit grateful that I am a foreigner here.

Japanese homes are a bit smaller than US homes, but not to the degree you might think. Also Japan has mastered the art of making the most out of limited space and you would be amazed at how much they can store in limited space. Collecting things is very popular here. Everything is collectible in Japan. There are all sorts of shops and resale shops for any manner of item.

You probably have heard, but Microsoft flopped in Japan. Xbox One struggles to sell more than a few hundred a month. PS4 and Switch sell more in a day than Xbox One sells in a month sometimes.

Last thing to note is that PC gaming never really took off here. It exists but nothing like in the US, South Korea or China. That IS a side effect of limited space, since a high powered gaming PC set up takes a LOT more space than a game system and a TV. Though as a side effect, because it is limited, it tends to be the most dedicated gamers, so they would be more likely to have a high powered rig.

I'm Indonesian, not Japanese, but i like Japan more than any country. Even my gaming habit is like Japanese people do (More Nintendo Handhelds / Consoles, No PC / Mobile games).

This makes me glad I don't live in Japan. No offense but that sounds absolutely miserable.

@Bolt_Strike Well, it is not as though it is universal and everyone has to live this way, and not everyone does. But a very significant portion of the the population does. Overall I agree with you, I work to live, I don't live to work.

I have been wondering about this many times. This is something that really puzzles me becase Japan has such a big entertainment business, they make videogames, they makes manga and anime, @Heavyarms55 said that people in Japan collect a lot of different things, it could seem like everybody thinks only about pleasure, fun and entertainment but actually it seems that life in Japan is very strict and sober, even almost harsh.
I've never been in Japan (I don't travel very much), and it really seem like often people are talking about two different countries. It is so hard to believe that people that are basically unable to enjoy any form of entertainment in their lifetime create so many different form of entertainment in such enormous quantity...

@LuckyLand One thing to keep in mind is that Japan is a country and countries are made up of individuals. Living here has taught me than even in Japan a country that is about 98% ethnic Japanese, there is still a huge amount of variety. There are still jocks and nerds, there are still ignorant and smart, there are hard workers and lazy people, tall people and short people, happy people and miserable people. There are people in Japan who have never played a video game and can't stand anime and there are people in Japan who can't go a day without games. Generalizations are often just that, general, not specific or all encompassing. Especially when you are talking about a group that numbers over 127 million individuals.

A lot of what people in the west, especially young people, think of as Japanese, are just some specific subcultures of Japan. You don't have to be ethnically diverse to have a good variety of diversity among a group. The dour lifestyle of the Japanese salary-man actually could explain why Japanese media tends to be so fantastical and extravagant.

@LuckyLand Well, video games can be seen as a form of escapism, and you could argue that the desire for escapism grows more intense as the restrictions of one's actual life grow more rigid. Perhaps when art isn't imitating life, it exists to provide exactly what we feel real life is unable to provide for us.

So I think certain things are perhaps not as contradictory as they may first seem. But I'm also wary of indulging the desire to form a 'Universal Theory of Japan', where everything ties together to make perfect sense, because as @Heavyarms55 puts so eloquently; Japan is simply big and varied enough to sustain millions of different people with equally many ideas and interests.

Rather than some exhibit frozen behind a glass display or academic curiosity to be debated away from an armchair, it's an actual country. A full-size, living, breathing country, under no more obligation to make perfect, unified sense than any other country.

On any given issue, the United States seems to sustain just about every opinion under the sun, and yet we are capable of identifying it as a country, even if it's 'collective consciousness' is a hot mess of conflicting values and ideas. Some jarring elements between within society are likely just a byproduct of enough people co-existing to be referred to as a 'society'.

So I'm sure many things which appear contradictory within 'Japanese culture' are in fact, simply contradictory. And that's fine, because the nation of Japan is simply a broad enough house to sustain them. Perhaps the best change we can make in our own mindset is not necessarily to 'resolve' the contradictions, but to better understand how they are distributed across people and time.

Why we crush all these competing ideas together is like somewhat to do with both cultural and geographical distance (it's easier to think of distant things as 'objects' rather than 'environments'), and also to do with the way Japan is often marketed to the wider world, where the most novel and intriguing aspects are played up and pushed to the front of people's minds. Simpler narratives are quicker to grasp, and everyday elements uninteresting, so complexity and mundanity are often omitted when discussing the country (at least in the West), resulting in a loud, clashing picture of vivid contrasts.

Anyway, sorry if that's a bit waffley, and I hope it doesn't sound too curt! I don't want to shut down conversation, because it's an interesting conversation to have! I've only touched on a few things, and I could be way off on others, but it's at least fun thinking about it.

I think you may be onto something here. This is exactly the reason why I play video games, they give me the means to experience different types of lifestyles that simply aren't possible in real life.