A Stroll Down Den Den Town Lane (Daniel)

I have been writing about Brian, Sarah, and my trip to Korea during Golden Week. However, it has proved to be a long trip in memory and I so decided to break up the post by days. Then I started writing about the first day and didn't even get past the first few hours. So here is the first part of the first day, we haven't even made it out of Osaka yet. I write the rest of the trip up in increments, as well, and then I will put them all together in chronological order to make a final, long post about the trip as a whole. This is Golden Week Part Day 1, Part 1

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Our flight to South Korea was scheduled to leave in the evening, so Brian, Sarah, and I spent our afternoon in Den Den Town. This is the nickname for the downtown Osaka neighborhood that serves as the hi-tech center for gadgets, gizmos, and garish technologies. When Westerners conjure images of urban Japanese streets littered in bright lights and parades of people in geeky costumes decorating every storefront, they are imagining Den Den Town. (Or more likely Akihabara in Tokyo, but this story doesn't happen there).

Pictured: The Japanese Spider-man/Charlie Chaplin cross-over comics that never reached the States for obvious reasons. 

Our first stop was at an antique video game store. We were, of course, carrying all of our luggage for a week-long trip. We had to delicately rotate our bodies to navigate through much of the shop. Luckily the oldest and most valuable game consoles were protected from our clumsy girth by a glass casing that ran the long horizontal length of the shelf. We snickered and awed as we passed fossils like the Atari 7800 and the NES, Nintendo's original home console. As we continued to browse through the relics we came upon the original GameBoy.

I remembered getting the GameBoy for my sixth Christmas and hardly putting it down until I was a preteen. It had looked so sleek and space-aged back then. Sitting behind that glass case, next to a dusty, hand-written price tag, it looked like a grey brick.

I was a little surprised to see the Super NES and more than a little surprised to see the Nintendo 64. These were machines that were released in the Nineties, during the core of my childhood. The Nintendo 64 is retro, sure, we all agreed, but antique? We all had to laugh a bit at how outdated our childhoods had become. But when I saw the Nintendo Gamecube I found it a little bit harder to laugh at myself. The Gamecube is a sixth generation console, post-millennial, employing optical discs rather than those old-fashioned cartridges, hell I played it into adulthood. 

I stared at the consoles and games of my youth long and hard, trying to see them from the point of view of the children running around the shop. Objectively, I knew what it meant that they sat in an antique section. I am not unaware of my own aging. Yet, I still feel young. And I don't feel outdated myself, well not usually, at least. I'm certainly not beholden to outdated things, at least not most things. Yet, as I try to keep myself open to the changing times I find that I am increasingly defined by the things that have already happened. 

I never thought I'd become an artifact collector simply by growing older. Also, if anyone is searching for some historic beanie babies, I've got nearly a hundred in my parents' attic.