Season 3 continues rolling with an episode 4 years in the making. Taiko drumming is a big a bedrock of classic Japanese culture as video games are for their current culture. Take a spin with Scot back into the world of Japanese arcades with the drumming game Taiko no Tatsujin, a fast paced rhythm experience that hooked him at just the right time, and his quest to find the game and achieve a perfect score on a special song.
He’ll take you on the journey across an ocean to recount the game and the song that combined to form a decades long obsession. Scot also examines the J-Pop song Sakuranbo (さくらんぼ), by Japanese singer Otsuka Ai as he tries to recreate another past perfect experience in the present.
Otsuka Ai – Sakuranbo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upODO6OuOOk&ab_channel=avex
Sakuranbo – Cocktail (Lounge Cover):
https://youtu.be/0SYe_-BKJWI?si=cx6SluQ8DSdNlFak
Sakuranbo (Kan Sano Remix):
https://youtu.be/eCRMqFAwbvQ?si=83_NGrFxI1l87T35
Zenius-I-Vanisher:
https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/
————-
Music from this episode by:
Shawn Korkie – https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie
Komiku – https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku
Shivam S – https://www.fiverr.com/imshivamsingh
Bastereon – https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon
Youness E – https://www.fiverr.com/elhajlyprod009
Daniel V – https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
Rob G – https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_robhttps://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob
Yaroslav – https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound
Aandy Valentine – https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
Production Transcript:
TPS017 – TAIKO NO TATSUJIN AND OTSUKA AI – SCRIPT – v1.0
- Hi, and welcome to The Perfect Show. I’m your host, Scot Maupin. I’m what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered ‘perfect.’ Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I’m presenting as a little nugget of perfection.
Everybody’s always talking about AI, AI this and AI that, and me? Trend-chaser Scot? Well I am not immune to the wave, nonononono but I guess I want to talk about a different kind of AI, and that’s T-A-I-ko No Tatsujin and Otsuka A-I, or rather, Taiko No Tatsujin and Otsuka Ai.
Okay, so there’s a lot to explain here, just bear with me a second. Otsuka Ai is the name of a J-Pop pop star, J-pop is Japanese Pop Music, Taiko no Tatsujin is the name of a Japanese video game which translated into English means Master or Expert of Taiko, and Taiko is the traditional japanese drum that sits up on a stand and is played by two thick drumsticks, usually synchronized in combination with a bunch of other taiko drummers.
Did that get it all? Okay whew.
So back when I lived in Japan I would avoid most video games. I know that sounds weird considering I made an earlier episode all about the Ten Yen Arcade, but I mostly didn’t go in and drop yen into video games there, and video games were really everywhere. There were little arcades set up in malls, at theaters, in grocery stores. Cabinets with different games and options. Don Kihote had a line of fun games, but the only one that really kept catching my eye was a game called Taiko no Tatsujin.
Because this game is about taiko, it’s not a normal game you play with a normal joystick or buttons. It’s a cabinet with two big taiko drumsurfaces, Like these big wooden barrels turned on their sides, and you play the game by hitting these surfaces in the middle or on the edges with large drumsticks.
Its one of those rhythm games, so you pick a song and the screen shows little drum indicators that move across the screen and you hit the drum when the circle gets into your strike zone or whatever, but the more you get dead on the higher your score is and if you get a high enough score you get another free play for another song. You’re alternating between red circles that mean hit the middle and blue circles that mean hit the edge, and the harder the song or level, the faster and more complex the combinations get.
Like basically guitar hero for drums, I think, but I didn’t play guitar hero ever. I played Taiko no Tatsujin. And played it and played it. Going to the electronics store for a new microwave? Better stop by the Taiko no Tatsujin on the way out and throw down a few songs. Getting groceries at Max Value? Might as well Taiko. Time for Daiso? Time for Taiko.
The song selection stage splits songs up into different categories, but because Japan, those categories were Anime, Vocaloid, Children’s and Folk songs, Variety Show themes, Classical, Video Game music, and J-Pop.
After trying a smattering of the songs I did recognize on the machine, and realizing that as a foreigner I simply wouldn’t know most of the songs on it, I did manage to find one Japanese song that I sort of decided would be my song, that I would practice on and try to get good on, and that song was called Sakurnbo – which means cherry – sung by the aforementioned Otsuka Ai.
Quick sidenote – some people call her Ai Otsuka, I call her Otsuka Ai, it’s a thing where some Japanese people like going family name first, like Otsuka Ai, and some like going family name last, like Ai Otsuka. I don’t have a dog in that fight, but when I was first talking to Japanese school kids in Kyushu about her they called her Otsuka ai so that’s what I call her.
Now I had known Otsuka Ai from before. And specifically that Otsuka Ai song, which I totally loved.
If I had to describe Otsuka Ai’s singing I’d say it feels like a musical form of sugar. She deploys her high pitched voice sometimes in long beautiful ballads and others in short staccato pop pieces. The instrumentation tends to change up depending on what the vibe of the song is but Otsuka is great at both. The song Sakuranbo in particular, is a 3 minute 55 second pop masterpiece. It zips along and has sort of a hyped up – I wanna say ska type beat? – but with all this other stuff on top, and then Otsuka is killing it with vocals that feel super poppy and she rides the melody perfectly.
I had a few Otsuka Ai albums and singles in my music collection from my days sampling the top albums each week and following my students’ suggestions, and Sakuranbo was one of my favorite songs of hers. But I wasn’t alone in that, far from it.
It’s a peppy pop song with some blasting horns over a syncopated beat, then you’ve got otsuka ai’s voice, which is light and airy, it sounds maybe like it’s about 40% toy and 60% human, if that makes sense. And then you put all that to a driving rhythm with lyrics creating a cute scene about how fun and nice it is to like someone else so much that you are like two cherries together.
The energy is infectious. I’m going to use MMm Bop as a unit of measure for this type of song. In reference of course to MMM Bop by Hanson, one of the most perfectly engineered pop songs of all time. For instance N*Sync’s Bye Bye Bye is probably about 85% of an MMM bop and Levitating by Dua Lipa would score around a 92. Get it? Okay, good. So I’d say Sakuranbo clocks in at 95% MMM Bop. Nothing to sneeze at. And if you were anywhere in Japan during the years 2004 and 2005 the song was absolutely inescapable.
Which was just fine by me. I love a pop song, and I cycle past the ‘sick of a song’ phase and back to fascinated pretty quickly, which is probably a really good thing for me, because Japan really knows how to smother you with a song. I think that’s why the music scene moves so fast there, songs, at least the most popular ones, reach enormous popularity, which seems to all be cashed in at once until everyone but the die hard fans are sick of a song and that works out perfectly because the studios need to clear the way for another song lined up to do the same thing with.
So you may encounter a song on the radio, of course, but I rarely listened to that. More frequently you hear it on the overhead music playing in stores and restaurants as you shop and eat. Even in a grocery store you may walk past a motion sensor and trigger a display to play the pop song at you and try to sell you potatoes, while the same pop song plays faintly over the store’s pa system, too. You also could run into it in the background – or foreground – of a commercial on tv, or in the luckiest case, as the theme song of a popular tv show, like a drama or anime.
And if by the end of that cycle you’re still not sick of the song then you’ll have every other Japanese singing celebrity give their go at a cover of it on different variety shows. But hopefully this all out assault on the ears of the population has resulted in a huge windfall from cd and dvd sales, and the slate of product endorsements.
So, back to Sakuranbo:
The song came out in December 2003, and was in full force throughout my first full year there in 2004, even being used, like I was saying, as the ending theme song on a tv show called “Mecha Mecha Iketeru” – which doesn’t translate as this, but they subtitled their own show with the English “What a cool we are.”
It was trippy just now to see this.
So I don’t know Japanese TV at all, really, but this was a tv show I knew. In fact, it’s strangely one I actually had been watching a VHS tape of for years.
And that’s because back in 1997 during high school, and during the home stay where one summer I lived with a Japanese family, there were several times where people in the Chigira family were watching tv, or I was flipping channels on the small set in my guest room. The tv shows were bonkers, a fact that is by this point well known and even probably a bit of a stereotype, but it wasn’t to me back then, and I was so into it that I even asked my host mother to take me shopping so I could buy a blank VHS tape. A move I realize now must have seemed like I was trolling her, but I wanted a video tape so I could record some of this tv and then bring it back home with me to show my friends in America.
I recorded a bunch of weird commercials, but the main prize to me on these tapes that I brought back to Kansas, was the episode of What A Cool We Are. I loved showing this to friends, I would say it was a lot like jackass, with a little more silly nature and much more Japanese flavor.
and looking up Mecha Ike, which it is often called, it started in 1996, meaning I was there for the first season of it, and now to come full circle, that’s the tv gig that otsuka ai landed for sakuranbo in 2004. Small world.
So in 2004 Otsuka Ai puts out her first album, called Love Punch, and Sakuranbo is the second single. Which a young Scot hears playing everywhere, and it works. I go to the Tower Records behind Kokura Station, get the album and then proceed to absolutely wear it out for the next few months.
Even now, 20 years later I still have Sakuranbo and 2 other singles from this album, Pretty Voice and Amaenbo, in heavy rotation throughout my music library. I hear them regularly.
According to Generasia.com, the song “reached #5 on the weekly Oricon chart, and continued to rank for a total of 101 weeks.” And “in 2004, it became the #12 best single single of the year. It also ranked on the 2005 end of year charts,” as the “#86 single of the year.” Sakuranbo is also certified Double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of Japan.
So when I saw Sakuranbo, a song I already knew, and liked, and had listened to over and over again, it became a perfect choice for playing on Taiko no Tatsujin. The reason that last bit was so important is that with any of these rhythm games you are going to need to pick a song that you will end up having to hear over and over and over as you practice it to eventually get it right.
Or not even get it right, but do well enough on it to pass and get a free second song…and sometimes third depending on the place…aeon mall arcade in asashikawa I’m looking at you.
And so after sampling the wide variety of songs on the game, I ended up settling in on two or three to focus on and try to actually get good at., and Sakuranbo by Otsuka Ai was always in that mix.
Back to the game itself, before you select your song, you have to select what difficulty you will be doing – this affects how fast you will have to hit the drum and how complicated the rhythms will be, there was kantan – or simple, futsuu – or normal, muszukashii – or difficult, and then – and I think this is another not small reason I enjoyed this game, if you hit the right side of your drum enough in this stage, it would unlock a secret level of ONI – or devil level, where the songs were extra difficult.
I remember only really being able to hang at oni level on a few super easy songs, but I just loved being able to open the option up and knowing the secret way to do that.
I usually stayed more on futsuu – the normal level, where I could pass several songs, and then even got to the point where I was able to get a perfect score on a few of them. A full 100%, meaning I hit every beat on time, I hit the edges when it said hit the edges, the center when it said hit the center, Every single one perfect for the duration of one whole song.
All you guitar hero people are like yeah, we get it, move on, but this was new to me. This was the first rhythm style game like this I had ever gotten into and man when I first hit that 100 % i was legitimately thrilled, like what? Did anyone else see that? Did that really just happen? I wanted to be like hey look everybody come look at what I’ve accomplished!
The combination of the physical action, the satisfaction of hitting the drum, the pep of the song, and the thrill of being so locked in that you get 100% of everything correct for the whole thing? When it all comes together at the same time, it is just perfect.
But that, like many skills, needs practice to maintain, and when I left Japan, I left arcades that had the taiko game, and I just resigned myself to be like – well alright, no more taiko I guess. Now there had been a version on the nintendo ds – a small handheld gaming device, but it was played by tapping your fingers on the screen and really lacked the whole body experience of hauling back and hitting this giant drum with these thick sticks. The home versions just really didn’t cut it. It was the same game, but not really the same game, if that makes sense at all.
So i figured that would just be it. No more Japan, no more taiko,[beat] but then I did stumble on the game, surprisingly, in a small arcade of Japanese games that was at the Japan Center Malls in the Japantown of San Francisco. It…had seen better days. First, the heavy taiko sticks had been replaced with thin regular dru msticks, and the sensors on the drum were more than a little bit dodgy. It had no doubt been imported from Japan, and maintenance on this uncommon device would be a big ask. But it was there, it had the songs I knew, and it was better than nothing. I would play from time to time if I found myself in Japantown.
I would discover that when the sticks were light and the sensors were dull the chance of getting a perfect score pretty much drops down to zero. But it’s still a place to play, or at least it was, up until COVID hit, and then that Japantown arcade was one of the casualties. Without the ability to have customers come in and hang out for long periods of time, they sold their remaining games and closed their doors for good in 2020. It’s now reopened as a japanese stuffed animals and collectibles store.
However I didn’t start this podcast until 2021 and while even in my earliest lists the taiko game was in the mix of episodes I wanted to do, how could I? My shot at recording the game had gone away when the arcade closed up.
Well, I mean I could go to Japan and find it there – wait – is that where I’m going with this? Did I manage to get a sponsor to fund a trip for me to Japan to find this video game again?
[airplane noises] [Brand song playing low?]
[hard stop][tires screeching?]
No. I wish. Maybe someday. I mean open invite, potential sponsors, If you have something that pays me to go to Japan or sponsors my trip to go record there I AM DOWN.
But I did happen to be able to come up with a semi-decent plan B.
I googled the game, and there are a few home versions, even some where you buy a little plastic taiko drum set to plug into your nintendo console which was not really what I was looking for either, but then I stumbled upon a strange corner of the internet I didn’t know existed before.
[music]
It’s called Zenius-i-vanisher.com, and it’s subtitle is ‘the #1 Ad-Free Music Gaming News Site, and it has a map and database of arcade games and locations. Its sort of like a google maps if the only locations it showed were video game arcades and kept track of the individual video games within those arcades. Like you can’t find just a Pizza Hut, but if the Pizza Hut had a Pac-man game, you could find that listed, along with what version it was, what condition it was in, and even how much it costs to play.
It’s set up rrlike this for all games. Or at least a ton of them. and thankfully one of the games listed is, you guessed it, Taiko no Tatsujin. I can search by individual mode, like meaning Taiko no Tatsujin version 6, or 7, or 8, there would be an updated one released regularly in Japan with some of the same classic song, but it would update and rotate in some new pop songs or songs from new tv shows, that sort of thing.
So I searched for Taiko no Tatsujin cabinets in the US. It showed one in San Francisco, the one from the arcade that had closed, and the next closest ones were in Seattle, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Boise, Idaho So there were some here in the US. And in good condition, by the looks of it, but they were about as close to me as Japan was, trip-wise, and that meant this idea would go on the back burner while I worked on other episodes.
And then a very nice coincidence happened. My family was invited to LA for a wedding, which meant we would be driving, and it looked like I would have some time to myself with the car, so I scheduled an extra stop into my trip itinerary, and while others went to see Hamilton, I headed over to the newly opened Round One Amusement Center at the Puente Hills Mall in City of Industy, CA. [TITO PUENTE MUSIC? – EL YOYO?]
So come back with me, listener, to the magically untroubled era of November 2021
[DRIVING CLIP] – green 1
I went inside and located the game straight away. With those two big drums it’s a pretty easy one to spot. It was card operated, where you charge a card with credits and then swipe it in the game before you play it and the game deducts however many credits it costs from your card. Coin operated machines, I think just coins in general, are being used less and less often.
I put 50 credits on my card, and then headed over to the taiko machine.
[TAPE FROM INSIDE LA ARCADE] blue 1
TALK OVER TAPE:blue 2 (TRIM DOWN)
So this is the point where it dawned on me that I wasn’t finding the one song I came out here for, but there was a timer ticking down on song selection, and I couldn’t be sure that I didn’t just miss it, so instead of panicking, as a backup I pivoted to a classical song – the theme from carmen
And I guess finally the realization started to set in on me
[TAPE – ITS NOT THERE ANYMORE.] – blue 3 & 4 (TRIM DOWN)
I didn’t know what else I could do so right there in the arcade I pulled out my phone and started to dive deeper into which songs were on what versions of this game.
[ME SEARCHING ON MY PHONE AT THE ARCADE] Blue 5
And I’m aware there are worse fates in this world than having to spend your arcade credits playing games that aren’t exactly the game you were trying to play, but still…
[BUMMED OUT TAPE END OF LA] – Blue 6
Man, i couldnt believe it. I had planned that out, no lie, for like a year plus and it just hadnt even occurred to me to check the version and make sure that Sakuranbo was still on it. To me that song is like ‘Hey Jude,’ I just figured it was a classic that would be on every single version.
So I was back to square one. And then after a bit of research I should have done earlier about what songs were on which versions of the game, I went back to the arcade game locator website.
And what I found was at the Las Vegas spot and the Idaho spot, both had the version of the game that I needed. I had been to both Las Vegas and Idaho, pre-covid, but wasn’t sure when I would be traveling to either next, so once again the whole episode got shifted to the back burner.
Until….in 2023 when I finally ended up flying again, – first time since 2020 – I found that I was able to turn a short layover in Las Vegas into a bit of a longer one. Long enough even to get out of the airport, and run one tiny little errand…
[ANY AUDIO CLIPS FROM VEGAS WALKING] – maroon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
And I eventually arrived at an arcade called Game Nest in the back corner of a block of shops off the strip a way and just in regular Las Vegas.
Unlike Round One, Game Nest operates on a time-based system, where you go in and buy a certain amount of time in the arcade, and then everything you do is free to play inside during the duration. This felt much closer to the asobihodai, or all-you-can-play deals that some Japanese arcades and amusement centers would offer.
[CLIP ENTERING GAME NEST, FINDING GAME] – Maroon 6 – Run this under the following talk after it’s clear that I am doing a transaction.
FINDING AND PLAYING THE SONG THE FIRST TIME – MAROON 7 (purple clip)—
Now this is my first time playing this song on this game in years, as we have EXTENSIVELY covered already. But listening back I notice a few things from my editors chair that I didn’t notice in my initial excitement at finally finding the right game.
Firstl, the song is MUCH shorter than the real Sakuranbo. The game version comes in at just 1 minute 20 secnds and the real version of the track is 3:55. I guess that’s not so strange. All you need is maybe the most well known verse and the chorus once or twice. The shorter you can get these songs the more plays you can cram in over an hour, which results in a machine that generates more money faster than it would the other way, I get that.
But now I’m also noticing something different. Something that I didn’t notice or even think to look for, or listen for rather. Here, listen back to this short part.
[CAN USE CLIP FROM MAROON 7 (purple clip) or MAROON 8 (blue clip)
And now Otsuka Ai’s studio version:
[PLAY A CLIP FROM THE REAL SONG]
Otsuka’s has bite. Does that makes sense? It has something a different sort of edge to it. Whatever is happening here, the main difference is caused by that not being Otsuka Ai singing. It’s a voice double. Like Now that’s what I call Sakuranbo Volume 1. Otsuka Ai Kidsbop.
I had been so excited just to find the song that I hadn’t realized it at the time, but it’s totally a cover by someone else. It’s close, but yeah, I’ve heard the original song thousands of times at this point, that’s a different version.
Me now is thinking this is completely because of licensing fees and rights for the original song and royalties for it, but back then I was still blissfully unaware of all of this. To me I had just found the Otsuka Ai song I had been searching for for years.
A few plays in, I got back to the level of hitting every single note of the song except one, – I did that twice, back to back, here’s my reaction to the second time:
[SECOND MISSING BY ONE TAPE] – Maroon 9- (green clip)
But then
[ONE LAST ATTEMPT TAPE – PERFECT GAME] – MAROON 10 (purple clip) and 11 (maroon clip)
I did it! Perfect game! Mission accomplished!
But actually, that’s a little forced. If i’m being honest it just felt okay, I guess. I felt good finally hitting the perfect game, because that’s what I was there recording myself trying to do, but I guess I just expected it to feel better, or more satisfying. Like in my memory.
(include this? – I hadn’t spotted yet what was missing, what made it so fundamentally different.)
Anyway, I still had time on my all you can play card, so I played some other songs on the Taiko game, played some other games around the arcade, watched two amazing syncrhonized players at some other rhythm game that I didn’t really understand, both wearing gloves and having to touch these points around a dial as a fast song played. They were both doing the same song together and moving in unison on their respective machines and it was completely mesmerizing.
[MUSIC TIME]
I watched them until it was time to go back and catch my flight out.
[MUSIC TIME]
So now I’d lost the game, found the wrong one, found the right one, and then even hit a perfect score. I tell myself that those are all the angles there are to get on this experience, meaning I was done,
and I really was,
I was good for over a year while this all sat during the time I wasn’t making the show. But that’s how this episode was going to end…up until I dug all this back out and started piecing it together in the present.
I was organizing some ideas for it on my iPad – a device I didn’t have when I was last recording, and it occured to me that there is a possibility of the taiko game, now 20 years later being an app that holds all the songs it ever had. I knew there were home versions of this game that I wasn’t going to pay any mind to, for other gaming consoles that I don’t have, but if there was one on the item I already owned, well maybe that would be a slightly different story.
I was skeptical though.
I went through a whole thing about how i thought a core part of my enjoyment was being able to really hit the thing a with full drum stick and putting forth some real exertion by the end of three songs back to back to back. I can’t see that being the same for a tablet.
But to test it out for sure, I roped my wonderful daughter Amelia back onto the microphone one afternoon.
[TAPE] PURPLE 1 – pink clip, PURPLE 2 – Maroon CLip,
And so I paid for the month of Apple Arcade, set up the app, and opened it up
[TAPE] – PURPLE 3 – Yellow Clip , PURPLE 4 (yellow clip)
[TAPE] – PURPLE 5 and 6 (drab green and hunter green) – the playing of SAKURANBO on the ipad. VOICEOVER of this next chunk during the tapping part of that song before the finish.
I guess I didn’t get too tripped up by the tapping with fingers instead of drumsticks, but I found on youtube there are companies that make physical drums to work as controllers that you can use on your app or on the switch that look pretty cool actually. I did none of that, however. Just Fingers Magee over here.
[TAPE] – PURPLE 6 (hunter green) should finish now with my getting perfect and being happy about it.
Again, I noticed on the ipad version they are also using the close but no cigar cover of the song by a different singer, and again it was not something i ever noticed in the moment, only after.
But speaking of similar yet somehow different, I figured the joy I felt hitting all the notes on one of those songs would be the same, or could be the same as it was when I would play in Japan, but even though I was doing the same thing both times, it wasn’t really the same thing.
[FINAL IPAD TAPE] – Purple 7 – drab green – more fun with 2 players at the same time – you dont have to comment on that, I’m just thinking out loud.
And there it is. The one thing I obviously missed, that I amazingly didn’t really factor in, was the 2-player partnership aspect of this game. I saw it in Las Vegas when I was done with my game, with the guys in the gloves playing the game in synchronized motions.
I was so focused on going out on my own, finding this game and playing it that I went ahead and just played it solo. Three times. In all three places, every game I played, I played by myself.
I think part of what made me love my times playing this game in Japan was the game itself, sure, and then finding the perfect song, which I’ve talked about, too, but there’s another aspect I haven’t really put enough weight on until now. The aspect of having a partner to play with.It’s just like dancing. You’re doing a difficult thing, at the same time as another person, and synchronized with them. You get the joy of executing a difficult task, something that takes preparation, and practice. Something that has a tail of effort that stretches into the past. And then for dancing with a partner, you mix all that in with attempting to be completely in sync with someone else. Completely present in the moment, so that you can be in the same zone, and attempt to move together as one.
You remember the guys I mentioned playing that mesmerizing rhythm game that I didn’t understand to music I didn’t know? It was mesmerizing because they were doing it together in unison, compounding the difficulty and multiplying the satisfaction of the achievement.
Yes, I can go and find a machine, go and find a song, and even pull down a perfect score on it, but then what? Who is there to share it with? When you play the game with a partner, you can celebrate with each other, for each other. Happy for your own accomplishment, and happy for theirs, with inside knowledge of exactly how difficult what you both did was, and even if it’s not objectively important – how much it meant to share that with someone else. A regular drumming partner who had got better at the game along with me.
I honestly don’t know how I missed that aspect before when I was planning all this out. Actually, that’s not true. I sort of do.
And I guess this is as good a place as any to get into it and talk about another huge change in my life.
So between the last normal episode – about pink shoes and punk shows – and this one there was a huge break. Over 2 years, as I said, and a lot has changed since then. I alluded to some changes in the update episode, but during that time my wife, who you’ve heard from before on various past episodes, but she and I have separated and are divorcing. It’s okay, I’m not really going to get into it apart from saying I guess it was a long time coming, and it wasn’t just one thing.
But back in Japan, before a lot of the stresses of married life, of being parents, of just getting older, before that we were just a couple of carefree young Americans, feeling out what it meant to live in a place as different as Japan, and feeling out, too, what it meant to be in a relationship with each other.
Taiko no Tatsujin was vibrant because it was well-designed, of course. Also because it piggybacked off some of the most perfectly built pop songs that I’ve ever heard, sure. But there’s a non-zero part of that perfect experience — you both getting a perfect score on the game together — that is the culmination of all the history you both share of getting better at something over time, and then executing on it in unison.
It’s what I feel like when I do jiu-jitsu with friends over years and years and we both get better. You have someone that is a special partner for you for that thing, Not only because you share the experience of it in the moment when you plunk those hundred yen coins into the machine and pick up the drumsticks, but also because you shared the journey with them of getting to that point. You join an elite club, and you can’t really replicate that experience or joy of synchronicity with someone not on your same level. And you certainly can’t experience that part of the game by yourself.
That’s friendships, that’s relationships, that’s really – companionship.
I think we are built for companionship, as creatures, on a very basic level, we rejoice in not being alone, and on some level the makers of Taiko no Tatsujin definitely understand that. It’s been two years for me now in this new reality, but I also have found my way back to not being alone again, and in a relationship that is going well. It’s a state that I seem to be drawn to. And it has ups and downs of course, but it’s really nice.
That’s why there are two drums, the play experience works best with a partner.
Taiko no Tatsujin is a challenge of hand-eye coordination, it’s a sensation of tactile feedback, and it’s an experience of fun music with cute character animations, those are always true, But at it’s most effective, and the level I didn’t hit in LA, Vegas, or on the tablet. it’s a game of synchronicity, where you and your partner cross the finish line together, and the only way to do that is to be in sync with them through experience.
When I recorded the second chunk of tape in Vegas I was separated, and I no longer had a partner to go with me, but even when I taped in LA and was still with my wife, by that point we were far from in sync. And I saw going on a trip to do this game thing as a way to go out by myself and get away from a lot of frustration and stress instead of as a thing I would need to do with my partner in order to get or recreate the full experience.
I mean, the game has literally been telling me this every time I’ve played it. It’s in the lyrics of the chorus of Sakuranbo:
Tonari do-oshi anata to atashi Sakuranbo.You and me, side by side next to each other – We’re cherries.
I think there’re a lot of physical gaming experiences with a partner that can get you into that zone. I see that as the crux of the Dance Dance Revolution revolution, it was Guitar Hero’ hero, and it’s the specific gem of pacific rim. chuckle/beat
Humans are ultimately solitary beings. We only really truly have ourselves. We are born alone and we die alone, but we do seem compelled to break up the stretches of solitary existence with companionships. Be it the Doctor in Doctor Who who just wants an audience on his travels or a partner who wants to partner in everything you do, I believe that while we are built by ourselves, we are also built for each other.
I’m not a fatalist that believes there’s only one match for each person out there. So in that sense i guess I don’t believe in the idea of one single soulmate – but I believe there are people, say you were ranking them on a ‘good match percentage’, there are people out there, scattered about in different places, for whom you would rank 96% or 99% or even 100% compatible.
And not just in a romantic sense either. This applies to romance, friendship, business, you name it.
It’s a bit on the nose, but in conversations I’ve had about this very thing I do call it ‘people you click with’ and really the task is to go out and live life, experience things that put you in contact with old people, with new people, with different people, or with different experiences, and if you want companionship with cool people, then your jobs are 1. to be ready to pick up on it when those people you click with come into your life, and then 2. have the courage to do something about it.
Something that may just be as simple as inviting them to grab some drumsticks with you and play a game together. You can always get back on the horse again.
And with that – Taiko No Tatsujin, Sakuranbo by Otsuka Ai, and playing a game with a partner, it all goes into the Perfectorium this time, the Index of Perfect Things.
Go to the show’s website perfectshowpodcast.com to see pictures and videos related to this and each episode, – for this one I will have some pics from my trips to the arcade, link some videos of people playing it better than I ever could, a cover Otsuka Ai did herself of the song for it’s tenth anniversary in 2013 re-imagining it as a sultry cocktail-lounge version, and a link to the Sakuranbo (Kan Sano Remix), which Otsuka Ai also released in 2021, I’ll drop that one here at the end of this episode because I think it’s pretty fun.
You can see all the entries to the Perfectorium at the direct link for it, perfectshowpodcast.com/perfectorium.
Special thanks to Round One in LA, Game Nest in Las Vegas and my iPad in Oakland for having versions of this game for me to play in the first place.
You can find the info and links for all the musical artists in the show notes and on this episode’s webpage.
As always, if you’d like to contact the show, you can email PerfectShowShow@gmail.com, and connect on Twitter, Youtube or Instagram to the name PerfectShowShow.
Oh right, and when I left my old place, i figured that would be a fitting time to close the doors on Morena Studios, my little set up there, and now, here in my new spot I have a new setup. So allow me to proudly announce that this episode was recorded on and mixed at Milky Way Studios in Oakland, CA.
I don’t do these on a set schedule, so subscribing via your favorite pod portal really is the best way to get every episode,
If you are enjoying these and want to drop us a rating or review, please do. It’s the easiest way to support the show.
I recorded myself leaving a review for a show last ep and that worked! I got a few new ratings and a review saying I have ‘Golden Retriever Energy.’ which I can’t really deny. I’ll take it.
So I’m reviewing another show this episode. And since this episode ended up being all about partners and companionship, I’m going to review a new podcast called ‘How We Met: A Queer Love Archive’
This show started in late January, and it’s hosted by Xandra McMahon, who creates each episode by letting a couple tell their story of how they got together in clips like those scenes with the older couples in When Harry Met Sally.
I work with Xandra, she’s aces as both a person and a podcaster. And she makes a show that both has interesting content and sounds great, too.
Okay, so getting back the ipad out, going to the purple icon for the podcasting, To the top right for the search bar. – How We Met – Queer – there it is. – Scroll down to the ratings and reviews, click leave a review.
This is all faster for me now because I did it last episode so I remember where to go this time. Okay. so putting 5 stars and then typing my review,
These are so lovely and charming. Magic on tape.
I love how the storytelling takes center stage on this show as couples share their memories of falling in love with each other. Really beautiful stuff.
There, submitted. This time it took under 2 minutes. I bet by the end of the season I can be like Nic Cage and get it done in under 60 seconds, the dream.
And remember, the whole point of this thing was really just to make the extended-analogy that Guitar Hero is basically the same as kissing, so – you’re welcome for that.
Anyway, until next time. I’m Scot Maupin, and thanks for listening to The Perfect Show.
( 50 eggs)
