Hey world!

Originally this blog was meant to capture some bits and pieces of things related to Japan and Tabletop RPGs. Over the last two decades I’ve sponged up a lot of “useless knowledge” of the games and gaming scene stuff that goes on here in Japan; and also have been following all the various foreign games that used Japan as a theme.

While my day job is “tech guy”, my background and love has always been rooted in Sociology and Philosophy (basically, what I graduated with in college), especially how different things work in different languages and cultures. When I meet other people with similar interests, these stories about the Japan gaming scene and how things are a little different over here (especially in a sense of, “This is something interesting that I think we could adopt into our culture as well!”) tend to really resonate with others. Basically sharing those stories (rather than keeping them to myself or word of mouth only) has kinda landed me in the role of “The Japan/Japanese RPG Guy”, and led me to do things like translate RPGs, promote unique Japanese cultural phenomenon, and write a few articles and blogs here and there.

Most of my primary game blogging had been done on Google Plus, though. And what I realized is that I was a little afraid to share things here (on this “J-RPG” blog) that weren’t basically mini sociological essays. For example, if I wanted to talk about just some cool event or convention I went to here, or some movie/anime/game that influenced me, that was more “fun” than “essay”, so it didn’t really fit. Every time I thought, “Hey it would be fun to blog about that time I ran TORG in Japenglish to a mixed audience”, I had an image of my academic advisor from way back when; slowly closing a book he was reading; slowly turning his head to me; a single tear running down his cheek… (heh)

Long story short, I wrestled with it a bit, and the length between posts here went to basically “one a year”. But with the recent shuttering of Google Plus, and the fact that I only use Facebook for talking to friends and sharing cute cat pics and memes, I realized my perspective of this site was a little too narrow. So, going forward, I’m going to drop the pretense of making everything a poignant micro-essay with some sort of “lesson”, and use it as my primary gaming blog. That means that there will be stuff here from time to time that is “general gaming” or “general life/living in Japan” stuff.

Not that there’s a ton of followers or anything; but since G+ is shuttering and the RPG Gaming Communication sphere is imploding a bit, I decided to take my show back to a format that I have full control over, untied to any other network (and with RSS feeds, so totally exportable to anyone interested).

That’s all for now, stay tuned!