Coin-op Chrimbo

Well, we can't say we weren't forewarned. Last year we were surprised to see so many Christmas decorations around Kobe, and equally gobsmacked by their total absence come the morning of the 26th. This year we went to Tokyo Disneyland and just managed to squeeze in a few hours of Christmas before Santa-san's little salary-elves removed the whole lot, literally overnight. This meant partially restocking all the shops, removing a whole bunch of Mickey Mouse Christmas tableaux, plus a ton of tinsel and a 40ft Christmas tree (below). All between the hours of 10pm when the park closed on the 25th, and 9am the next day, when it was business as usual. Nifty work indeed.
The main emphasis in Japan is on the New Year - Christmas is only really of commercial interest, feeding the national gift fetish. It's literally just another day at the office. New Year is the only time when things really do shut down, and there's not an awful lot for the geijin to do - Japanese friends are with their families and all the museums and public buildings are closed for the week. So, three cheers for Namco Land... it's a coin-op crimbo!

Sarah is a dab-hand at the tippy-tippy and pokey-pokey games. Normally these involve manipulating some kind of crane or hook in the X-Y axis and tipping or snaring the prize and dropping it into the win-chute. This is all something of an alien concept for a Brit, as we are conditioned to believe that anything even remotely similar to this must, by default, be some kind of pikey swizz. But in Japan things are a good deal more honest and it's actually possible to win stuff - just take a look at the impressive haul that Sarah managed to assemble in less an hour...
Speaking of pikey swizzes, there's a curious role-reversal when it comes to the kind of fairground side stalls that seem to be a feature of the many festivals here. The stall owners don't need to bend the barrels of the guns - the Japanese are such terrible shots that is doesn't seem to matter. In fact it's the punters that are given to cheating - the scene below is not uncommon at a number of festivals we've visited, and the guy still doesn't hit the miniature bottle of no-name brandy or the packet of 20 Caster Super Mild (which, ironically, cost at lot less than the 500 yen you pay for your 5 corks).

But back to Namco Land. Jessica and I opted to play a cross between Crompton's Cakewalk and Monopoly, on the grounds that we could figure out the rules relatively easily. You roll medals down a chute to throw the dice and, well, play Monopoly.

We did pretty well, amassing a small bucketful of medals in the same amount of time that Sarah took to rape the tippy-tippy machines. Turning this small bucketful of medals into anything other than a small bucketful of medals proved our undoing, however. The pimply youth on the help desk patiently (using diagrams) explained the process for stashing the medals - when weighed, we had 450 - which involved an eight-digit password of my choice and electronically fingerprinting both my index fingers. So, this was our Namco swag (although we do still have 450 medals in the virtual Bank of Namco, and Jessica's going to have to cut my hand off to get them...).