NEWS
I was recently in Japan on business, seeing the World Expo 2005 site in Aichi, touring sake breweries in mountainous Takayama and dangerously depleting the national reserves of Asahi beer. But I had another goal in mind, beyond trolling the 100-yen stores for products with hilarious English labels and creeping out Harajuku girls by asking them to pose for photos.
I wanted a PlayStation Portable and I was not going to leave Tokyo without one.
"But Steve," you might say. "Why buy a PSP in Japan when they're coming out here in Canada in a matter of weeks? March 24, to be exact, at a retail price of $299.99."
And I respond: "Who actually talks like that? Do you make infomercials or something?"
Anyway, I am both a gamer dork and a hopeless early adopter. I can't wait three weeks to get my hands on something new, cool and so, so shiny. I require immediate gratification -- as in now.
So the quest begins on a clear but chilly afternoon in Tokyo's sprawling Akihabara district -- mecca for all things electronic and nifty. From cellphones that do everything except prevent you from calling ex-girlfriends while drunk to plasma HDTVs the size of Godzilla -- if you can't buy it in Akihabara, it doesn't exist.
Which might lead one to believe the PSP, in fact, doesn't exist. Sony's challenger to Nintendo's handheld dominance went on sale in Japan last December, but most stores have had trouble keeping the cute little oblong slab in stock.
Still, there's no better place to look than Akiba, as it's known to the locals, where the boulevards are lined with vertical malls that devote each cramped floor to a specific category of electronics, movies or various aspects of game geekery.
In the case of the first place I looked after getting off the subway, it was two storeys of electronics.
I headed to Gamers, the famed Akihabara department store catering solely to its namesake market.
Gamers had the PSP value pack in stock for 24,800 yen plus tax (about $300 Cdn.), which includes such extras as a wrist strap, case, headphones with remote control and a measly 32 MB Sony memory stick.
Since I already have a honkin' big memory stick and I swiped a set of headphones from Sony's PSP event in Las Vegas in January, I wanted the cheaper stand-alone unit, which Gamers didn't have in stock. No problem, on to the next place.
One hour and six stores later, I realized I'd made a grave tactical error. Not a single one of them had the PSP in stock, not the barebones unit or the value pack bundle, not for love or money or all the sake in Takayama.
Some even had signs posted in English to ward off foreign devils who can't read "sold out" in kanji script.
At the Messe San'oh store on Akihabara's famed Chuo-dori street, for instance, a sign read, "We don't know schedule when PSP come. Sorry no more question about PSP."
At other stores, PSP queries were met with the universal Japanese symbol for "no dice, sucker" -- fingers crossed in an X and an apologetic shaking of the head.
And so I scurried the several blocks back to Gamers, hoping I hadn't turned down the last PSP in all of Tokyo. My new friend behind the cash register smiled knowingly, and brought out the shiny new unit he had shown me earlier. He hadn't even taken it back into the storeroom.
If I could understand Japanese, I'm sure I would have heard him say, "I knew you'd be back, silly foreigner. Should have just saved yourself the time and bought it here first."
