The Cat’s in the Cradle.
The night before the photo, I had told my wife that I had wanted to go record shopping in a relatively close Tokyo neighborhood. At the time, we were a year and a half in to our three year stay in Japan. As a result of this stay, I had rediscovered my love of music shopping via records.
That morning, I just wasn’t feeling it.
I woke up tired and semi-infected with some manner of cold virus thanks to our children being incubators for all manner of disease. Catching a train (even though the rail system in Japan is superior to that of the States) that becomes a big petri-dish because of the amount of people that try to pile in, wasn’t something that I had wanted to partake in on that particular day.
As a compromise, and to ensure that I got out of the house (because she had threatened to make me miserable if I didn’t), my wife suggested that I take the boy. I quickly reasoned that that option was the way to go. He used to be a train fanatic (and still is to some degree), he’s almost always good company, and he’s been having a hard time socializing with other kids his age.
His reluctance to socialize started before we left the states. On top of that, getting a straight answer out of him when it comes to expressing feelings is a Herculean feat. Unfortunately, he takes after his father in that respect. If I had to guess, I’d say that the impermanence of friendships when you live a gypsy lifestyle really sank in when he learned we’d be living in a foreign country for a couple of years.
So I took the boy on a train ride. A short train ride. Because I was being a sick wimp. We got off at Tachikawa, had lunch at McDonald’s, and I alternated between me, tripping on the generally laid-back-ed-ness of the city and trying to get him to participate in our semi exploration.
Then we found an arcade.
Arcades are plentiful here. These are old school arcades, the kind that used to be popular in your neighborhood shopping mall way back in the 1980’s. Fun fact? Most of the arcades that you tend to see in Japan are owned by SEGA. Funner fact? I have seen on occasion video game consoles in local Japanese malls. How the arcades compete with the now commonplace-ness of home gaming is a bit beyond me. Personally, I think that arcades have survived in Japan because a large part of the currency is coinage.
Everything less that 10 USD is coin, you could probably apply my numb-but logic to the popularity of gambling here as well.
The Boy perked up as soon as he realized that he was actually in front of an arcade, not watching about them via YouTube. After a quick once around in order to see what this arcade had to offer, I surmised that the video games he wasn’t interested in so much. Claw machines? That’s his shit. Claw machines are even more of his shit when one of those machines has a clock in the shape of a cardboard boy.
Are claw machines rigged? The short answer is yes. A lot of the rigging has to do with the strength of the claw and how much the owner of the claw machine wants to nefariously twirl their mustache like the villain that they are. The real question is, are claw machines rigged in other parts of the world?
25 dollars and a half an hour later, we had attracted the attention of the Arcade attendant. Being amused by my dedication and my son’s fanaticism, he offered some pointers before going back to tending the other machines.
10 minutes laters the attendant came back to see us still at it.
Graciously, he opened the case, rigged the box to where a light breeze would have blown it over and said to me in perfect english, “Hit it right there”, while pointing at a crucial area of the box.
Welcome to the home of the Rank Spoon! 