Or “How I Learned To Read Japanese, and love the bomb”

Spring 1990. Having crossed my 18th birthday and just about finished college, the idea of filling my wallet before heading off to university seemed a good plan. When a mate mentioned that the slightly dodgy back alley bookshop/comic/RPG/war-game/videogames emporium he worked at was looking for someone who knew something about the Atari ST to stop them getting landed with quite as many cack games on buy-in, we quickly convinced Stuart (the boss) that I was the ideal candidate.

I was installed for the summer on £20 a day plus benefits – stock at cost, overnight loan of kit if you were in the following day, the ability to private-buy anything particularly good before the shop got a look-in, and spending all afternoon playing California Games on the persistently-unsold Atari Lynx if you were sent downstairs to look after the bookshop bit while Stu was out. Perhaps we could have tried harder to sell that…

Long before Dead Or Alive Extreme Breast Jiggle

The shop was a pretty disorganised place, I still don’t know how they managed to stay in business. Coins were stored in a cardboard box under the counter, notes in the back pocket of the staff (frequently accidentally taken home). Sales were supposedly written down in a ledger - which was usually at least £50 under the money taken, as you forgot to write when it was busy.

(One day Stu handed a bollocking out to me and Jon about that. At count up, I did the cash, he did the book. “£450.35!” I proclaimed. “£186.50” he replied. Whoops. Spent the evening trying to remember what we’d sold so we could add it back in on the Sunday shift – highly lucrative and fought over by us casuals, being £50 for 6 hours work – before Stu got to the books.)

Our books were between these extremes

A small but growing part of the business was import Megadrive games. It was rapidly clear to all involved that bailing out of the ST and Amiga and replacing disks with hard to damage, easy to test and impossible to copy carts was sound business sense. We casuals certainly found consoles more fun, the ST market was drying up and trying to figure out games with ludicrous anime manuals was great. Occasionally I got to take consoles apart to change the jumpers from Japanese to English. Plus carts could be stored behind the counter in cassette storage racks rather than endless boxes full of brown paper bags.

Oh – it wasn’t that sort of bookshop, although there was one time that opening up in the morning I fell over what turned out (when the lights were on) to be 700 soft porn mags that Stu had bought from a local judge.

This never happened

We attracted the attention of many a local schoolkid, many of whom would hang around from school kicking out to us closing. “Can I try <insert game just in>” is a phrase I never want to hear again.

One kid’s parents ran a nearby Chinese. Can I try
the Egg Foo Yung please

One bored day I made an observation that the Japanese writing on the boxes for all the games that were titled “Super” something (then, as now, it was a high percentage) all had the same first four characters. “Hey. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the names were really in English?”

Half an hour and a quick run up to Waterstones later, I was in possession of a telephone-directory thick Japanese-English dictionary, and discovered a priceless table on the inside front cover. Ten minutes later, we were in shock as several games previously of limited fixed identity turned out to have rational English titles after all.

Well, nearly rational.

This translates as ‘Lungrisser’ or ‘Rangurissa’.
We have no idea which. Or what it means.

An hour later, I was knee deep in the release schedules out of the back of some overexcitable Japanese gaming magazine that had suddenly became a mine of useful information enabling Stuart to set his grand strategic plans for game orders. The usual principle was to page-count the hype, look up the title on the release schedule, and phone the importers nice and early with a big order (or, alternatively, wave off on some piece of shite).

This became a regular evening pursuit for us – by this point, my brother Rob had joined the semi-regular staff, and four of us would regularly collect at our or Jon’s house in the evening with the latest borrowed console, piles of comics, and Japanese games mags, playing games and trying to work out what on earth Super “Hydlide” would be called by the time it turned up here (slightly disappointingly, it turned out to be Super Hydlide). Bloody marvellous days! After a month or so, I didn’t even need the katakana chart.

The kids regarded us as gods due to our in-depth knowledge of Japanese games and release dates but mostly because I had worked out how to play Herzog Zwei. The irritation that nobody else would play me at it because they always lost still rankles.

And oh, the delight at spotting ‘Out Run’ in the release schedules for a couple of months later. I was later to wish I hadn’t, after Stu ordered 200 copies and sold 20.

Stu: Muahahaha!

I think the shop has more or less gone now (it did last long enough to fund Rob’s pre-university summer in 1992, and for many years it occasionally rose from the grave for a while then disappeared again). The copies of Out Run were claimed on the insurance when the shop nearly burned down (due, surreally enough, to a chip-pan fire).

I can’t read katakana any more, but recently I found the dictionary when cleaning out the last boxes of junk at my parents. Hm. su-pa what

DIO, July 2004.

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