J-Tech TOYS
SYNOPSIS- Andy talks about the new kinds of things that you can buy in Japan that either don't exist or aren't big in America.
Essentials of Japanese Travel
(clockwise from Boba Fett)
Recordable Mini Disc and Discs, Print Club stamps, Phone card for public phones,
Manitee, PHS mini-phone, Hand-controller for MD, Passport.
NOTE: I'm going to keep adding to this page until my friends from America tell me that these sorts of things have arrived.  Also, I'm not including every aspect of J-Tech, just those things that interest me.  If you own or know of a J-Tech toy that isn't listed here (or you have a cool narrative of some aspect of existing J-Tech [ex. I was thinking about doing a bit about the popularity of UFO Catchers, which are hardly new...]), by all means write me manji@sunfield.or.jp...
VIDEO GAMES

As I left America, some people who could afford it had a Playstation, but most people are waiting for new games to be made for the Nintendo 64 and Saturn before they decide which to buy- after the whole Nintendo-Sega-Turbografx thing from some years ago, no one wants to be on the side of a loser (like that Atari Jaguar that lasted about as long as mayonaise in the sun).
In Japan, though, Playstation is the undisputed competitor of the Sega-Nintendo-Sony line.  Nintendo still has like 6 games (all of them "too 3d" for my tastes), and Sega, well, Sega has always seemed second best.  Anyway, I have been thinking about picking up one for two reasons:  Final Fantasy VII and Front Mission 2.  I've seen commercials for this Front Mission 2 game, and it looks like a more arcade-like Mechwarrior on crack.  The only thing keeping me from buying a used Playstation is the simple fact that I'd never, NEVER leave the house.  Andy the game freak, that's me.  If you want the more physio-psychological reason why I fear home game systems, back up to my personal webpage, and find my Personal History- check around those Junior High School years.

Anyway, in the arcades we have a variety of games.  There are those "riding games" like a virtual skateboard and virtual snowboard game.  There is also a virtual "horse racing" game, although I don't think that any American would be caught dead in an arcade making fucking motions, no matter what the game was.
One of the new games that I like to play is Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter.  I like the fact that you can choose to be a geeky high-school Comics Nerd (name forgotten) who just wanted to go to a comic convention.  His "fireball" move is cowering in the corner while some object, like a compass, teddy bear, book, or what have you flies out of his book-sack.
There's a brand new fighting game by CAPCOM (the actual game's name I forgot)... anyway in this game you play people from Street Fighter and Dark Stalkers- but only child versions of them.  It's kind of cute, actually.
 

PRINT CLUB
This is such an overwhelmingly Japanese phenomenon, even beyond the Tamagotchi, that I had to give it it's own space.  Usually these large machines are found in Arcades.  In any case, these machines (there are usually a lot of them in one area) are colorful, bulky, and have a screen about half a meter away from the screen to serve as a background.  This machine basically takes your picture (you get to select background and any additional words like "Hello", "Love Love", stuff like that to go in the foreground), and copies it onto a small sheet about 16-20 times. The sheet is a sticker sheet, and those 16-20 pictures are removeable- you can stick them wherever you want.  They are a big personal trade-item.  If you are with a group of people and you wander through an arcade, it is more likely than not that you will plop down 300 yen for a sheet of Print Club (Japanese "purikura") with your friends.  I have taken to doing Print Club by meself, and then sticking them to letters or postcards in lieu of a return address.
PHONES

I had to get around to it sometime- PHS, The Personal HandSet (System?).  Another Japanese phenomenon.  Remember the old days of the beeper?  Well, the beeper is in decline rapidly these days, because now you can buy a phone for about the same price and slightly larger monthly charge.  And the phone itself is slightly larger than a beeper- we're talking you can conceal this thing in your shirt pocket.  They are an integral part of nampa (picking up guys/girls) because you can stick people's names and numbers into memory so that you don't have to write them down.  The PHS system is quite a feat of radio signal networking- most large towns or cities have a large receiver that the PHS signal transmits to and from.  Step too far out in the country, though, and it stops working.
By the way- all those scenes you've seen of people (young men, ladies) on the phone- They're not "closing a quick business deal".  PHSes are pretty much used solely for chatting with friends.

MUSIC

Mini Disk.  You can't escape- they're everywhere- in the electronic stores, commercials (BTW- the guy from Jamiriquois does the commercials for Sony MiniDisc- he takes off that big, silly hat of his and there's a MiniDisc player on his head.  He even ends the commercial with, "It's a SONY", the slogan used in Japan.  I'm not sure if this justifies moving him to "sellout" status- no one said that Jamiriquois' songs had any real meaning behind them, other than to make you feel good when you listen to them.
Anyway, these little things are incredible.  An average MiniDisc recorder-player runs about 20-30 thousand yen (2-3 hundred bucks).  With it you can make your own Mix CDs.  You can record with CD quality on these little disks, which are about as big as the length of your thumb, squared, up to 74 minutes.  You can create tracks, erase them, divide them or combine them long after you've recorded the songs.  In other words, it's not Write Once material.
Some other features that I thought were pretty cool... If you use a standard RCA cable to record from a CD player to the MD, it will listen to the CD-noise for track changes- In other words, as the tracks change on the CD, new tracks will be made on the MD as well.
You can also name the disk and the tracks using numbers, letters, punctuation, even japanese katakana (probably won't be available on American versions).  You can also use upper-case and lower case.
 

COMPUTERS

Since high school I haven't been nearly as much as a computer Otaku as I was, so I'm not too into the realm of new computer toys, but I thought I'd mention some things that I've seen here:
Oh BTW, as for American vs Japanese tech arguments (which are often pointless), I just wanted to give my brief and probably innacurate account of the differences between computer tech:

America seems to come out with all the cool software (businessware, games, Microbeast apps, etc) first.
Japan seems to implement new/experimental hardware MUCH faster than in America (ZIP Drives, CD Writers, other compresed storage systems).
I can't tell which country comes out with the new hardware faster.  It doesn't really matter, since most tech leaps seem to come from the many American-Japanese team projects going on all the time, anyway.

Back to computers.  ZIP drives are pretty common here.  There is another format of data storage that's falling out of style in favor of the faster ZIP drive- Magnetic Optical- it's slightly larger than a music recordable Mini-disk, and it can apparently hold more data than ZIPs but has a much, much slower access rate.
iO-MEGA, the company that made the ZIP-drive, just released a new compressed disk drive.  It's expensive now, but there's a lot of people waiting for when it makes its public debut at a reasonable price, which could happen as soon as early next near.  This new disk can apparently store something like a couple gigs, and has an access time much faster than a ZIP drive, with access speeds equalling standard hard drives.  This all comes from my friend Shigeru, by the way, who has a new Mac and pretty much stays on top of these sorts of things.