Filibuster Cartoons
Japan (official motto: “It may be a holiday right now! Ask your server for details!”) has a lot of holidays. Many of them are stupid. Many are also very foreign, and would never catch on back home. But I think there may be some marketing potential for “Coming of Age Day,” which occurred last weekend.
Basically, Coming of Age Day is a highschool prom that is held for no reason. Teenage girls, until the age of 20, get to spend an entire day off school, all dolled up in their prettiest, most expensive Kimonos, with equally elaborate hair and makeup that their parents are expected to pay for. It’s a time to celebrate being young and pretty. And living a freeloading life under wealthy parents.
The girls prance around the malls and so forth, hanging out with their girlfriends and just generally “being seen.” Sometimes there is an official function in the evening, held at some drab government hall, where you can go and hear the mayor give a speech about the importance of maturity or whatever. But many girls rightly skip this snooze-fest and just go party.
Boys can get dressed up and have fun too, but many don’t, rightfully assuming this would be “gay.” But there are lots of pretty girls everywhere, so it’s not entirely boring for them.
It’s a big day for the hair and makeup industry, not to mention the kimono dealers. These dresses tend to cost anywhere from 500 to 1000+ bucks, not counting, of course, the inevitable handbags and shoes and so forth. And the photographs, my god the photographs. Nothing short of a professional will do. And then you need to book a park, too… and the limo ride TO the park…
Some might say proms would be a lot less fun if you had them every year. This is not a line of thinking that is common in Japan (official motto: “coming soon, Christmas 2!”).
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PART II
Okay, so everything in Japan basically has its own store. I already discussed the terror that is the Pokemon store in a previous post. This weekend I decided to venture to the Squaresoft store. Or more properly the “Square-Enix” store, since the makers of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior merged sometime ago, unbenknowst to me.
The store is rather unspectacular. It’s located in an isolated area of Tokyo that is hard to get to, under a big highway overpass. The physical building is small, only one floor, and when I went there were few customers. It mostly sells action figures of Final Fantasy characters and other junk you can buy just about anywhere in Japan, really.
But it does have one thing, one amazingly chilling and disturbing thing that no other store in the world has.
Are you ready? Maybe you should scroll down a bit first.
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The Square Enix store….
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*….is in possession of…
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My God, this country…
