02.19.07
Nappies and Manners
From the following screenshot of a game that teaches you womanly manners (in the Japanese fashion), which one is correct if you’re pouring beer for a man? 
Let me get this straight… I’m no OTT feminist bitch, but this just sucks. There’s a game designed by a woman, might I add, that teaches other women ‘manners’ – that is, subservient attitudes towards men and older people. Damn Confucius and his ‘men are superior to women’ ideas that still persist in the Far East. Taito made this utter garbage, so I’ll blame them if that triggers a rise in imbecilic females in Japan (as if we didn’t have enough of those already!). Coming out for approx. £20 for the DS on 5th April, it’s official title is 私のハッピーマナーブック (roughly translates to My Happy Manner Book – ewww!). The thing is, I’m sure it originally had good intentions, like literally letting people in on the secrets of certain Japanese customs that’s hard to grasp without understanding why it came to be. But judging from the mini-try-out thing on their site, it’s ended up by becoming something that tells you what you must do in certain situations ‘because we say so’, never mind the reasoning behind it. And yes, this game is solely for the women, so unless you’re really interested in some sociological research, there’s no point getting it – oh, and it does not have nude anime women, so you geeks can forget about this too.
The 10th Pokemon film’s set to be released soon, if some of the articles are to be believed. And they’re opening up voting for the best Pokemon ever (out of 11), from their previous 9 films. So fans, go here, click on the middle flashing bit (screen1, not 2) and vote which one you want in. Results will be announced 15th March. As with anything to do with merchandise, it’d help if you lived over there, and got yourself your favourite Pokemon ticket to receive the winning monster on your Diamond or Pearl game chip…
This hard-to-read article was interesting enough – based in the States, the writer comments on how different marketing techniques are compared to Japan. Most Japanese channels aren’t cable, so everyone gets pretty much everything, and there really aren’t that many channels to choose from unless you went and got satellite. So it’s fairly easy for companies to go round spamming every channel with their marketable product, with the result that everyone will eventually recognise the product as ‘the one that’s on ads’. That obviously doesn’t work in the States where there are literally hundreds of channels, some localised, some categorised, etc., so you need targeted marketing. And that got me thinking. We’ve got cable, and we do watch some channels when we’re not gaming outright, so naturally we notice the ads too. We like watching CSI, so we channel-hop between the ones that show the series. So why the hell is it that we come across lots and lots of nappy ads? Surely CSI doesn’t conjure up images of nappies, do they?
Joanna said,
February 21, 2007 at 4:01 am
Hi! I’ve been reading your website for a little while, I can’t remember how I came across it. Anyway I hope you don’t mind me linking to your site ^_^ BTW, I agree with the manners DS game, I’m always interested in what is considered “manners” and what is socially acceptable, etc. Though I think maybe I just wanted to see how much it would set me off, heh.