March 27th, 2011
The Seedy Beginnings of Nintendo
Gangsters, gambling, and a love hotel:
Hanafuda is a traditional Japanese card game that is often played during the New Year’s holidays, at least today. In the 1880s, it was played by gangsters, and its popularity spread due in large part to gambling. The Japanese word “yakuza” originally meant “useless individuals” and is derived from a losing hand played with hanafuda. Just as Nintendo’s lore is inseparable with hanafuda, so is hanafuda impossible to disentangle from the history of Japanese organized crime.
That isn’t to say Nintendo was originally run by Japanese gangsters. Saying that would be like assuming that all Vegas dice makers are run by the mob. However, there is no doubt that yakuza were gambling on Nintendo hanafuda. Fusajiro Yamauchi, it seems, saw a demand and then filled it. For customers, he only had to look outside his door. The area was teeming with bakuto (groups of gamblers) and racketeers.
The original Nintendo headquarters is located in a part of town that’s the turf of the Aizukotetsukai, one of Kyoto’s oldest and most powerful yakuza groups. Now in its sixth generation, the Aizukotetsukai were established in Kyoto in 1868, over a decade after the U.S. “black ships” arrived on Japanese shores that opened the country to the West. The group’s founder Senkichi Kousaka, aka “Kotestsu Aizu,” was an infamous gambler and swordsman in his day.
“The Aizukotetsukai used to control the town but it’s unclear if they controlled Kyoto at the time Nintendo was born,” explains Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice and co-editor of website Japan Subculture. Nevertheless, the group remains active in modern Kyoto, as evident in this police archive still from an Aizukotetsukai ceremony
February 22nd, 2011
In Great Gatsby news
First, I’ll have to admit that The Great Gatsby was never my favorite novel. I found myself hating every character and wishing nothing but ill will towards them. I doubt this is a healthy response to one of the great novels of the 20th Century, but it is what it is. With that said, I would be excited as hell if this were actually real.
Great Gatsby: The Video Game
The joke behind this is that supposedly Nintendo create this game and never released it. Considering the internet buzz with The Great Gatsby: The Video Game, Nintendo should start looking towards adaptions of other literary classics. I would thoroughly enjoy Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Imagine yourself in the shoes of Josef K. playing a video game for hours and hours without having even the slightest clue of what was going on. Perhaps they could do an entire Cormac McCarthy series where the games follow the tried and true formula McCarthy has used for years in his novels…..depress you to the point of suicide and then just end without any closure. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to share.
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In a rare Great Gatsby double feature, there is even more shocking news concerning F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Some complete f’ing moron Baz Luhrmann has decided that the only thing that can make fine literature into a successful motion picture is to shoot in 3D. Yes, The Great Gatsby will be a 3D movie. I’m just done.
September 28th, 2010
Geek pr0n (ctd.)
If you thought this was awesome, wait till you see the mother-lode.
