…as seen in this week’s Megatokyo. You see, this is why we hate “Japan” people. Not because we hate Japan or the Japanese or anime or anything, but because of the whole unshakable conviction that Japan is a magical paradise of video games and cartoons.

Japanese kids just DON’T play video games, and the problem has got so bad that Namco gave it as one of the reasons they’ve merged with Bandai. They own handheld consoles (on which to play Pokemon or Starfi) till the age of seven, because that’s how long it takes for their hands to be big enough to hold a controller. They then get either a Gamecube (for Pokemon Stadium) or a PS2 until they hit tweenage. At this point they either mate with it for life (in the case of boys) or throw it away to pursue a youth filled with boys, mobile phones, selling underwear to old men and trying to turn their skin from yellow to black and their hair from black to yellow (in the case of girls).

The ONLY reason a Japanese teenage girl visits an arcade is:

1) To do “Novelty” stuff like printing stickers of their faces and downloading ringtones from the Konami net terminals.

2) To play adorable games about bursting brightly coloured bubbles

3) To look bored with their boyfriends

4) To watch said boyfriends feed quid after quid after quid into the prize machines in an attempt to impress them, NOT BECAUSE THEY WANT THE PRIZE, but because they want to guage the extent to which he’ll break and humiliate himself for them in order to better assess how easy he’ll be to crush beneath their heel should the relationship turn serious

…EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER ARCADE IN THE WORLD.

Fred Gallagher is a profession real live manga artist!!1 and was once less than ten meters away from a real live Japanese person (although they could have been Chinese or even Korean – they were fat and the lighting was bad and they all sort of look the same).