Nice. Japan is getting weirder and weirder every damn week. Thank GOD these aren't true, right? RIGHT?

I just tried to put a little UA spin on odd stuff I've noticed while living here. The grain of truth in each of them is scary enough, leave it at that.

Drinking three of those horrible Japanese canned coffee drinks has strange effects on Personamancers who weren't born in Japan.

I heard that one could wield a sword forged from cold iron that only had to land the smallest of hits on his opponent before the poor fool would EXPLODE. And I mean, EXPLODE, like, he was just ripped apart from the inside-out, blood like a geyser and limbs flying everywhere, even if he just cut him lightly on the cheek. Nasty.

After living there for two years...

Yes. I believe Japan IS that weird.

There was a cult just a few buildings away from our apartment complex. At night, on my walk home from the local bar/cafe where I would smoke my cigars and get free drinks from the other patrons (sometimes being a QUIET foreigner has some perks, including downright interesting conversation), they could be heard chanting to the beat of a drum. A strange guard with a yellow armband sat facing out of the door whenever there was chanting.

As far as the "only people from Tokyo get drunk" thing though, I can say that in my small town (and many others) Japanese are the hardest drinking people in the world... for about five minutes. Seriously. Zero to fall-down-the-stairs drunk in five minutes. I would wager some of the fastest charging Dipsomancers live there, though I'm sure they blow their loads rather quickly (read into that as much as you'd like).

Finally, my wife loved that corn soup. She only got it in powder form, though...

After living there for two years...

Yes. I believe Japan IS that weird.

There was a cult just a few buildings away from our apartment complex. At night, on my walk home from the local bar/cafe where I would smoke my cigars and get free drinks from the other patrons (sometimes being a QUIET foreigner has some perks, including downright interesting conversation), they could be heard chanting to the beat of a drum. A strange guard with a yellow armband sat facing out of the door whenever there was chanting.

As far as the "only people from Tokyo get drunk" thing though, I can say that in my small town (and many others) Japanese are the hardest drinking people in the world... for about five minutes. Seriously. Zero to fall-down-the-stairs drunk in five minutes. I would wager some of the fastest charging Dipsomancers live there, though I'm sure they blow their loads rather quickly (read into that as much as you'd like).

Finally, my wife loved that corn soup. She only got it in powder form, though...

Well, crud. Double post...

Weirdly enough, I saw my first Japanese drunk in Kobe at the weekend, being slowly but carefully walked away from a public place by some police... Made me realise that he's the only one I've seen so far, and that was the middle of the day, too. I guess J-Dipsos must be manic-depressive with their Mojo...

I also love that corn soup.


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You heard about the S&M love hotel in Osaka? The one with the Hello Kitty room, you must have seen pics on the internet... The thing is, the silly themes like that are there to distract you from what else is going on. Now, you get "normal" dungeons and all that crap, but the ones to worry about are the ones done up to be like part of a Highschool classroom, or a section of subway train... 9 out of 10 customers use them for kinky sex or whatever, but word I've heard is that some people use them as proxy locations for working mojo. The scarier J-Rats can even pull people from a real location into one of these rooms, I heard, and then have their way with them... whatever way you want to take that.

'Course, other people say you should stay away since it's run by a bunch of Urbs who wanted to sniff out rivals...

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The reason the Japanese conviction rate is so high isn't because they force false confessions, it's because they get people from alternate universes where the defendant DID commit the crime to confess and sign it. The whole court system knows about it, which is why when people try and argue the confessions that they never made the judges always say it's inadmissible or whatever...

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Tokyo has more "secret" subway tunnels that aren't part of the public networks than anywhere else. They go to places under the Emperor's palace, nuclear bunkers, and the like.
Thing is, not even the J-Rats will go near them. And every Duke I know who went to check them out never came back.

...you busy Saturday?

Split because of the 2500 character limit;

I heard there was a nutso Clockworker in Akihabara, wasn't quite right in the head (even by their standards), and a buddy of his asked him for something that could "Gattai" with anything else mechanical and try and take it over, like a certain recent anime that reminded them of all the stuff they'd loved as kids. To give it the juice, the Gearhead gave up all his childhood memories of mecha anime, and didn't deal with it so well. Developed a pathological fear of humanoid robots, which meant his friend found him curled up in a gibbering mess surrounded by his creations having suffered a total breakdown. Way it was told to me, his buddy took him to hospital, then ran off with all clockworks he could carry... including the newest one, which is about the size of a human head, and can convert any piece of machinery with enough raw materials into a steampunk-looking mechanical body for itself...

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The new vending machines which need to scan your ID card to buy booze and cigs are all just a plan by the tobacco companies to replace you with duplicates!
...no, I don't know why. But it's true!

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In case of emergency, the artificial islands created for KIX Kansai International Airport can separate and combine into a self-sufficient arcology. None of the ones in Tokyo do though, since that's not where the REAL power in Japan lives.

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Kyoto's got the most convenience stores per-capita than anywhere else in Japan, or the world. More than it should be possible to support. Guy I know tried to study what was going on, I found him with a pair of cheap combini chopsticks shoved in his eyes in front of a map with a pattern drawn between all the stores. I don't understand what he saw, and I don't want to, either.

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Someone said that all Ainu have the potential for magical power. ALL of them. It's why they've been systematically pushed into extinction by the Japanese government. Someone else told me it's because of their language, nothing to do with genetics or anything. I wanna find out for myself, but do you know how goddamned hard it is to find anyone to teach you?

Ever since the Aztecs went belly-up, don't you wonder who's been feeding the sun?

See everyone says that Shinto is just this massive power vacuum but they haven't been to the New Year celebration at this little place somewhere in Yamanashi. (Well, I heard it might be in Shizuoka but a friend of mine said that a friend of his, who's totally trustworthy said he actually saw this somewhere in Yamanashi)
See there's this tiny little wizened man who's supposedly the museum curator at the temple, and why in a mountain temple would you have your museum in the basement? Anyway, he gets wheeled out at New Year and somehow he sucks all the power out of shinto into himself.
No one knows what he uses it for, but he's really old looking...and you don't get old-looking in Japan until you've passed 200...

If you don't get old-looking in Japan until you're in your second century, then I'm never going back to Kyoto. Age of the average household in my old neighbourhood would be about a millennium, and I don't want to be around a bunch of people that powerful who've not rubbed each other out yet.

http://inventorspot.com/articles/pork_your_pork_6934

What. The. Hell.

If you've lived there, you're not as shocked.

Shocked that it exists, yes, but not shocked it's in Japan.

"yin and yang of the universe ... everything pure and good about humanity, all its hopes, aspirations and dreams, all the noble impulses and kindness you can muster ... darkest parts of the human conciousness, hatred, deceit, unwholesome lust"

Yin and yang are about balances between raging passion/calculating cool, white fire/black water etc, not good or bad. Worse, juxtaposing western Judaic religious ideas about good or bad (kindness, nobility, lust, deciet) on something Japanese is a crass declaration of cultural ignorance. Keep your Christian moral values the hell away from my nihilistic postmodern fantasy.

"Catch is, doesn't matter if it's prepared by a master chef or almost-certain-death homemade sashimi, you only get a minor each time"

That actively violates a Bodybag's charging structure, as well as being symbolic horseshit.

"Weird thing is, you almost never see any drunks at all outside of Tokyo, even the bums."

You can tell you've never been to Japan. You really can.

"2ch is the homegrown Japanese equivalent of the Maks. Both groups know each other, and sometimes trade info and rituals, but for some reason they both HATE 4chan with a passion."

2ch does not hate 4chan, as anyone with remote experience of either website will already know. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but that's just plain retarded.

"Before Kanji were adopted from the Chinese, ancient Japanese people were terrified of written language as writing one's name supposedly gave others the power to steal your soul."

Why? Why would you make something this stupid up?

"Shinto is BS. All of it."

Shinto's probably the very closest thing you can compare UA Demons et al with religiously. Also, to say the least, claiming no-one in Japan has ever become a ghost, ever, and therefore the ancestor worship rituals and shrines to nature spirits have never had any symbolic merit? Did you think any of this through at all?

"Ever played "Fatal Frame"? Whole goddamned game's true."

Fatal Frame, the game based on Shinto superstitions and ghost lore. All of which is bullshit. Hmm.

"Supposedly, it's impossible to gain a charge off Geisha with any kind of Sex magic."

Handily, in Japan an actual Geisha is specifically an escort who does *not* provide sexual services. And there is absolutely nil religious element to being a Giesha. Which you would know if you were not just a weeaboo and actually knew goddamned anything about Japan.

W T, do you have any idea what this game is about?

These aren't real world "facts," but rumors from the western-centric occult underground for use in the game.

Remember, in this game truth is subjective.

Ease up, man.

When different rumours in the OU don't contradict one another, worry. ;)

You also seem to have missed the point of the "Rumours" section, W T. Ars hit the nail on the head. gb2/b and all that jazz.

As an aside, for anyone else who's curious, most of them are /meant/ to be western-centric BS, inspired by real things that I saw/thought about while living in Japan. I really didn't see a single drunk within my first 6 months out there, the fugu thing came from me remembering (after I'd eaten some) that I was terrified by the concept of eating it when I was a child, the drugs thing from when I wanted nasal decongestant for a bad cold and couldn't find any, and things like the Tokyo secret subway and the name writing superstition are based on real rumours I heard while out there (http://www.nhk.or.jp/shiruraku/200704/thurseday.html was an NHK program someone told me about, for example, which is where the name thing came from. Long story short, before Prince Shotaro pushed Buddhism in ancient Japan, there really was a weirdly strong belief in the power of language, which is the source of some traditions which still exist, the whole okaeri/tadaima thing etc. Supposedly it's one of the superstitions he quashed and replaced with terrible Chinese superstitions instead).

Now back to the entertaining game-fodder already. :P

Ugh. ^ Prince Shotaku. Smoooth.